


Strike from the Records

by SylphofScript



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Because Neil Hargrove sucks, Canon-Typical Violence, Explicit Language, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Multi, Post-Season/Series 03, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Burn, Slurs, Steve Harrington-centric, Underage Drinking, Whump, Whumptober 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2020-11-22 06:48:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 31
Words: 63,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20869958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylphofScript/pseuds/SylphofScript
Summary: If there’s one more thing Steve should have walked away with after so many incidents with the otherworldly, it’s to never trust the slow points.They were only ever a blanket of lies, covering up a brewing storm.Too bad Steve never learns.Written for Whumptober 2019. Starts off as one-shots set in the same timeline and turns into more of a plot-driven story around chapter 5.





	1. shaky hands

**Author's Note:**

> It'll take a little bit for this all to get shippy, so just bear with me.
> 
> This is all for [Whumptober 2019](https://whumptober2019.tumblr.com/post/187356400823/october-approaches-and-so-does-whumptober-2019)! It's been years since I've done anything like this, so here's hoping I can make it all the way through!
> 
> Apologies in advance for any plot holes that might happen. It's surprisingly hard to keep your plot straight when you're literally making it up day by day.

Robin’s with Steve the day his doorbell rings unexpectedly. It’s a rough day, that day, one of the days they had every so often where one of them, or sometimes both, would wake up from a nightmare and it would ruin their mood for the rest of their waking time. That day it had been Robin, because Steve hadn’t slept that night, too wrapped up in his own unnamed fear after nearly fleeing the RadioShack when a radio shorted out and started shouting out something garbled that didn’t remotely sound like Russian, but still shook him right down to the core.

It had been Robin, and she’d been a jumpy mess all afternoon. Dropping things, startling when someone walked up behind her too quietly, nearly knocking over an entire display a la Steve Harrington (because Steve was prone to doing that, sleepless nights or not) when she hadn’t been keeping an eye on where she was going as she returned movies to their shelves.

And, on days like that, they had a routine that followed if their schedules allowed, and that was to hole up in Steve’s almost perpetually empty house and make a night of ignoring their demons. It wasn’t the best coping mechanism, but it worked for a time, and it’s not like they were going to do anything else about it when monsters weren’t real in most people’s eyes and they probably wouldn’t believe them if they tried.

(Never mind the fact the monster had been right there, dead and gross and a spectacle for Hawkins to look upon. The news media sure did a good job of flubbing the details, that’s for sure.)

The routine worked, and it had already been decided that that was how they were going to spend their night.

It’s when they’ve just gotten off of work and are bickering about which movie they wanted to watch that night that the doorbell rings, startling both of them into silence. Robin, perched up on one of the kitchen counters, tilts her head at Steve questioningly, her eyes narrowed at him in suspicion, and Steve shrugs in total ignorance.

“I’m not expecting anyone, stop looking at me like that,” he barks at her as he leaves to check who it is, the thumping sound of Robin’s socked feet hitting the floor telling him Robin, nosy as she was, was coming too, whether he liked it or not.

To say he’s surprised when he finds Nancy standing on his front porch, holding herself and looking like she wants to break, would be the biggest understatement since El told him she came from a “bad place” when he’d asked.

“Nancy?” Steve says, blinking like he doesn’t believe she’s actually there.

“Hey,” she greets hesitantly. “I wasn’t sure you’d be home, but I saw your car, and I just…”

She trails off, but Steve can hear the rest.

It hadn’t been easy with Jonathan’s departure. Nancy hadn’t taken it well, but she hadn’t come running back to Steve the second he was gone. She was stronger than that, and Steve knew that maybe more than anyone else. She’d spoken to him on the phone a few times when she was a little rattled, but she’d always hung up with someone to turn to, usually Jonathan calling her back, and she’d never sought him out in person.

Steve wonders what changed for her to do it this time. If she was feeling worse than what a phone call could remedy, or if no one had picked up and she just didn’t have anywhere else to go.

Steve knew how it felt to have nowhere else to turn to, and he wouldn’t turn her away for the world. Even if he didn’t love her anymore, she was someone special to him, and nothing could make him forget that.

“Hey, no, yeah,” he says hastily, opening the door wider and shaking his head like he was trying to dislodge a thought he didn’t want. “I just got off work. What’s up? Everything alright? You wanna hang out?”

Nancy’s lips quirk up in a small smile of amusement over Steve’s rapid-fire questions, and she opens her mouth with what is probably a reply, but then her eyes widen, and her lips turn to a small “o” of surprise, and Steve can suddenly feel the looming presence behind him that is undoubtedly Robin looking over his shoulder and trying to see who Steve was talking to.

“Oh,” Nancy stutters. “I didn’t—sorry, I’ll just— I’ll go.”

Nancy turns to leave, but Steve jumps out the door and stops her with a hand on her wrist. She doesn’t turn around again to face him again, but she’s not tugging to get him to let go, so Steve counts that as a minor victory.

“Nancy,” Steve says gently. He tries not to think about how small her wrists are, how much he missed holding her and feeling her hands pressing against his chest. “Please. Just wait a second.”

Nancy turns. Her eyes are huge, looking up at him with things he doesn’t know how to name but knows he feels, too.

“C’mon.” He jerks his head to the side. “Come in. Hang out for the night. We were about to blast some _U2_ and gorge ourselves on pizza. Maybe make brownies and try not to burn the house down.”

She hesitates, her bottom lip curling up beneath her teeth. Steve can tell she wants to, he’s seen that look on her face a dozen times before, but something is holding her back. He knows it’s not her morals—they were going to be normal brownies, thank you—but he can’t tell exactly what has her hesitating.

But then her eyes flicker to Robin, standing in the door behind Steve, and his heart sinks with realization.

“Nance,” Steve whispers. He tries not to sound like he’s pleading, but he’s not sure he manages. “She understands.”

Nancy’s eyes well. Her face hardens, and Steve immediately can tell what’s coming. He knows he can’t stop it.

“No,” Nancy whispers back. “She doesn’t. She can’t.”

Steve jerks his head to look back at Robin, but she’s not looking at him.

Robin’s watching Nancy with eyes round as the moon. Steve hears her breathing hitch, and it’s the only indication he has that she’s barely holding it all in. Robin was made of some seriously tough shit, but she had her bad moments after the attack at the mall, and today was one of them. Nancy had been the one to interrupt, and Robin knew Steve could never turn her away.

But Nancy surprises Steve. She only takes one look at Robin, and all but melts on the spot. Her armor has cracked, and now she was spilling out.

“I’m sorry,” she breathes, reaching up to smother her face in her hands, her shoulders dropping with the weight of her world. “I didn’t mean that. I’m just— I’m sorry.”

Steve reaches out and pulls her all the way into the house. Robin shuts the door for him, and he nods at her in thanks. She nods back, eyes bright with unshed tears, and Steve notices her hands are shaking when she pulls them off of the doorknob.

Nancy shudders with unreleased sobs. Steve stands there and holds her. He tries not to press his face into her hair, but he ultimately fails, and she smells like the same shampoo she’s always used since he first started knowing what she smelled like. She still feels like _Nancy_, and it’s a shocking comfort to him in the days where everything seemed to have changed.

They stay like that for a few minutes until Nancy calms—her in Steve’s arms and Robin standing awkwardly at the door, her eyes on her hands as she wrings them and waits—and then Nancy lifts her head up, sniffs, and turns to look at Robin.

Robin lifts her eyes, the same eyes that always got Steve to do the absolute stupidest shit, and she cracks what Steve knows to be her best attempt at a reassuring smile. It’s not great, but Robin was never a picture of reassurance in any instance.

Nancy surprises him then. Again. She pulls an arm out from where Steve has her folded against his chest and holds it aloft in a silent offer, one that Robin blinks at in utter confusion at until Steve mimics the gesture and lets her know that it’s okay.

So Robin joins them, and Nancy holds her tight against them both, almost sandwiching her between her body and Steve’s.

It’s a little awkward, three-person hugs were never much of an act in perfect harmony, but it’s good enough for them to stay in it long enough for the sunlight on the walls to start dimming and the crickets to start up their song.

It’s in that moment, with his arms wrapped tight around the girl he once loved and the one he almost fell for, that Steve realizes something still felt like it was missing.

And it’s not until they’ve peeled away and Steve’s run off to start up the music and Robin and Nancy have already teamed up against him in the kitchen to make sure he won’t go eating the raw brownie mixture that Steve surprises himself by thinking a single thought that stays with him for the rest of the night.

He wishes that Jonathan were here, too.


	2. explosion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for implied abuse and slurs, because Neil Hargrove is a racist shit.

Steve doesn’t lose his temper.

He gets mad, sure. He throws a fit sometimes, yeah. But he doesn’t let himself loose when it’s fury fueling the want.

He knew what could come of something like that. He saw the way his dad relied on his ire when things didn’t go his way.

Steve knew better than to let himself become like that.

So Steve doesn’t lose his temper. Not anymore.

That is, until he became a surrogate parent to a child with a dead brother and a piece of shit stepdad.

Then, really, it's all fair game.

* * *

The first time the Byers household comes back to Hawkins is for a short visit before school starts up, because staying away ends up being harder than any of them anticipated, and Steve shows up with Dustin and Lucas in tow. Mike is there, and so is Nancy, and Steve realizes, after a headcount of all the little shitheads that were starting to get too tall for their own good, that one is missing.

“Hey,” he calls to Nancy once he realizes, and both Nancy and Jonathan turn to him at the same time. “Where’s Max?”

Nancy’s head snaps to attention, looking around, and she looks back up with a frown. “She was supposed to be riding her bike here.”

Steve doesn’t immediately think anything of Nancy’s statement. Not until Nancy looks to Jonathan, and Jonathan’s face starts to crease with worry.

“I’ll go get her!” Dustin offers, raising his hand and nearly smacking Steve in the face, and Lucas pushes him and retaliates, “No, I will! She’s _my_ girlfriend!”

“Okay, no,” Steve interjects, placing a hand on each of their heads until they scowl and swat him away. “_I’ll_ go. I have the car, idiots. I’ll see if she’s home or on the road here.”

Nancy looks relieved. “Thanks, Steve.”

“Save me a piece of that apple pie before Dustin gets to it,” he calls over his shoulder as he goes to his car, laughing the offended “hey!” from Dustin that follows.

He’s only just made it into the car and turned the engine on when a knocking noise, followed by his passenger door opening, startles the absolute shit out of him. He looks over to find Jonathan sliding into the car, and blinks stupidly at him.

“Uh,” he tries. “What are you doing?”

“Helping you,” Jonathan answers simply, buckling his seat belt.

“I’m just picking up a kid.”

Jonathan glances up at Steve, his dark eyes searching. “We hope you’re just picking up a kid.”

Steve’s stomach plummets, and he has to swallow about the lump of nervous anticipation that springs up in his throat. “Sure know how to make a guy lose his balls, huh, Byers?”

Jonathan gives him a small smile. “You’ll be fine.”

* * *

They make it to Max’s house, and it’s immediately obvious that she’s home, because not only is her bike in the grass in front of the house, the front door is open, and Steve can see her red hair through the opening when they drive past it to park in the street.

They don’t even have to roll their windows down to hear the sound of someone yelling. It’s too deep to be Max, as loud as she’s capable of being, and Steve’s out the door with Jonathan hot on his heels before he’s even thought about what he might be getting himself into.

The yelling becomes clearer the closer they get, and Steve can make out full sentences before he’s even reached the porch.

“ —a black, Maxine! You’re no better than that no-good pussy of a brother you had!” Mr. Hargove spits, his volume only growing as he got more riled up. “Getting caught up in that Satan’s business. I didn’t raise him like that— Won’t raise you like that! Bless the lord from taking him before he could become more of a disgrace to this family.”

Suddenly, Steve stops thinking. Suddenly, Steve’s vision starts to tunnel around the edges with black. Suddenly, Steve’s heart is in his head, because all he could hear was his own heartbeat.

Steve explodes.

Something in him snaps, and he busts through the open door of the house and starts yelling. Starts battering the sack of shit with every word he knows how to use, spits curses and weaves his anger into a ruin of emotion, feels his throat turning raw with the accusations he throws at the man who threatens to disown his daughter based on the color of her boyfriend’s skin—the man who _lost a child _and said, _Good riddance._

He can’t hear himself, so he doesn’t know exactly what it is he’s saying, and he won’t remember any of the words later when he finally calms down, but he knows they must be something, because Neil’s face pales just before it starts to redden again.

It takes Jonathan grabbing him under the arms and hauling him out the door to get him out of the house at all. Steve curses the whole way, not so much struggling against Jonathan as not helping him carry Steve away, and Jonathan accidentally knocks Steve’s head on the door of the car when he tries to throw him into it.

“Go!” he hears Max scream from the backseat, and all he can think is, _When did she get back there?_ “Jonathan, _GO!”_

The engine revs, and Jonathan peels out of the street.

* * *

Steve is pretty sure he blacked out.

He doesn’t remember getting to Max’s house. He doesn’t remember _getting_ Max. He doesn’t remember returning to the park where they were holding the get-together, nor the apparent excuse Jonathan had given to his mother before running back to Steve and taking him on a drive, with Nancy in tow.

He certainly doesn’t remember losing his shit on Mr. Hargrove, but that’s what Jonathan tells him once they’ve pulled over somewhere remote and talked to Steve like he was a child until he calmed all the way down.

He thinks maybe the Russians did a worse number on him than he allowed the paramedics to believe when they’d talked to him after the burning of the mall and the battle with the monster, but, really, that was _their_ job to figure out, and it didn’t matter now.

“He really went after Max’s dad?” Nancy whispers from the backseat, under the impression that Steve can’t hear her for some reason, and Jonathan is nodding enthusiastically when Steve cracks his eyes open to look. His cheeks are ruddy with excitement, and he glances over at Steve in surprise when he realizes Steve is looking at him.

“Hey!” he says quickly, hushed, and Nancy pushes herself up to look him in the face.

“Steve Harrington,” she says gently, but so firm Steve already knew what was coming, “_you_ are an idiot.”

Steve laughs then. Laughs hard, and laughs long.

Laughs until Nancy and Jonathan are both staring at him with worry, and then giggles a little more from behind his hand.

“Sorry,” he says when he’s done. “Guess I had to let that out. Weird fucking day, guys.”

Nancy snorts. It’s unladylike, and it almost gets him going again. “So I’ve heard. You went after Mr. Hargrove like a tiger.”

Steve almost growls like he’s chastised Dustin for doing, but he manages to catch himself and stop that in full. Instead, he swallows. “Never liked that guy, anyway.”

Nancy and Jonathan nod in agreement. They don’t say anything else, but Steve can see the worry still creased in their expressions, and, honestly, he wanted nothing to do with it. Not now.

He smacks his hands together as if dusting off dirt. “You know what I need to remedy all of this? Ice cream. You wanna go get some ice cream?” he asks, pushing up in his seat so he can look at them both, just to see the relief on their faces, and he isn’t disappointed.

“Sure,” Nancy agrees, a small smile spreading on her lips. “Jonathan?”

“Yeah,” Jonathan says, almost faintly, and his eyes never leave Steve. “Sounds good to me.”


	3. delirium

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note for underage drinking in this one.

Jonathan returns the night of Halloween.

Steve knows, because Nancy was on the phone with him after Jonathan had called her and told her he couldn’t stand the town he was in and wanted to come back, originally for him to ask her if she wanted him to extend a movie rental she’d taken out. He never did get an answer on that, now that he thinks about it a few days later, and he decides it’ll extend it anyway, just to be safe.

“So what are we doing on the ‘ol Hallow night’s eve, Stevie?” Robin questions him, leaning over the counter and watching as he shelved movie boxes. It makes her _A Nightmare on Elm Street_ shirt fold awkwardly, Freddy Krueger’s face distorted to a kind of hilarity. “You’ll never get away with trick-or-treating, and parties are so _high school_, right? You’re a big man on the town now, you got places to be.” She pauses, tapping her chin, as Steve stands up and levels her with a bored look. “You wanna pop enough popcorn to make Santa weep and die by the kernel in front of some shitty B-movies?”

Steve frowns, leaping up to sit on the counter next to her. “Why would Santa cry about popcorn?”

“I’ll take that as a yes!” she declares, snapping her fingers just as the door chimes with a customer, and Robin’s uncharacteristically quiet “oh” is his only warning before he’s turning to see Jonathan standing right there, looking just as nervous as he used to back when they were in high school together and he didn’t have a backbone to his name.

“Oh, Jonathan,” Steve greets in surprise. “Hey, heard you were coming to town. Didn’t think I’d get the chance to see you before you left again, though.”

Immediately, Jonathan seems to turn into a different person. His shoulders relax, his hands drop from where they’d been messing with the zipper on his jacket, and his back straightens as he levels Steve with an easy, small smile.

“Hey,” he breathes meekly, the only divergence to his suddenly comfortable demeanor. Robin looks at Steve in confusion, but Steve ignores her.

“You here for movies or?” Steve tries. He waves his hand out towards the shelves. “Not a whole lot else to offer, really.”

“Yeah, uh,” Jonathan nods, only glancing over at the movies once. “Yeah,” he says again, and Robin huffs a nearly-silent laugh. Steve restrains himself from elbowing her, but only just. “Nance and I were going to have a movie night and give candy out.”

“Great minds think alike!” Robin coos, and now _she’s_ elbowing _Steve_. Steve pushes her elbow away. “We were going to do the same.” She glances up at Steve, and he doesn’t miss the way she’s suddenly grinning mischievously when she turns to Jonathan again and says, coyly, “We should combine our efforts. Join us.”

Jonathan hesitates.

Steve looks at Robin, wondering what she’s getting at with the sudden invitation to, uh, _his _house, but then shrugs at Jonathan because, yeah, he’d like to have his friends around while they were all together to _have_ around. “Sure, yeah. Come over. I’ve got a stupid amount of choice lying around the house. It’ll save you from risking late fees and shit, anyway.”

Jonathan blinks at him. “Er,” he says, like he’s about to say no, like Steve’s pretty much expecting him to, because why would he give up a night alone with his _girlfriend_, and then he nods a few times and continues, “yeah. Cool. What time should we come by?”

“Six,” Robin cuts in before Steve can answer. She’s still grinning like the devil. “We’ll make a party of it.”

* * *

Steve checks on Max again that night, like he does every night he doesn’t have all the kids with him, with the walkie-talkie they had coerced him into keeping next to his bed in case of emergency. It had been months since the incident with her stepdad, but, as it turned out, he’d been drunk as a skunk that day Steve and Jonathan had picked her up, and had apparently seen the light after whatever it was Steve had said to him in his fit of rage, because he was in rehab while Max stayed in the house with her mom, and he hadn’t done more than call her to apologize since.

Steve knows its for the best, but he can't help but feel a prickle of guilt for what her family life had become, and he calls her to make sure she’s okay, and that Neil hadn’t come back and made things worse. He thinks maybe Billy’s death was the final straw on an already sore back, and Neil just hadn’t been able to recover from the blow. Max and her mom were mum on the subject, though, and Steve didn’t push for details.

He only hopes they all come out of this okay.

She’s going out with the group to hunt for candy, even though they’re all starting to get way too old for that kind of thing, and he tells her to radio him when they get to Mike’s that night so he doesn’t have to call and seem like an overbearing older brother.

“You already are an overbearing older brother,” Max corrects him sassily. “Actually, you’re worse than my mom. You’re like an overbearing new mom, only. Like. A guy or something. Oh, I hear Dustin at the door. Gotta go.”

Then she flips her radio off and leaves Steve to himself. Steve decides, as long as they’re all alright, that he doesn’t really care about the snub.

* * *

Jonathan and Nancy show up at the door with a plastic bag stuffed with candy and cake mixes, two six-packs of beer, and a bottle of rum. Steve blinks stupidly at the alcohol first, then rushes to let them in. Robin’s already got the record player blasting in the background, and Jonathan wrinkles his nose once he’s set down his bags.

“Don’t like my taste in music, Byers?” Steve taunts, grabbing the bag and starting to dig.

Jonathan grimaces, more of an act of exaggeration than a show of distaste, even though Steve did know Jonathan to be picky about music. “You could do better,” he admits.

Steve snorts. “Yeah? Well, I got records out the ass. Player’s in the living room, if you can manhandle Robin out of the way, the thing’s all yours to commandeer.”

Jonathan blanches. He doesn’t really know Robin, Steve remembers suddenly. Steve grins and grabs his shoulders, wheeling him around to the kitchen’s exit. On the other side of the island counters, Nancy is smothering a laugh behind her hand.

“S-Steve, wait, hold on,” Jonathan protests, but Steve’s not stopping, and, when they reach the hallway, he calls out, “Robin! Someone’s got a problem with your choice in music!”

“Yeah?” Robin calls back, and Jonathan’s shoulders immediately tense under Steve’s hands. “Send ‘em my way and I’ll prove to them the merits of _Led Zeppelin_.”

Jonathan turns to look at Steve with wide, betrayed eyes, and Steve only cocks his head and shoves Jonathan along, waving goodbye as he retreats.

“He’s going to sulk about that the whole night,” Nancy greets upon Steve’s return, and Steve slides himself up onto the counter to watch her as she starts pulling pans out of his cabinets, apparently remembering where everything was after a single night making brownies.

“I’ll get him over it,” Steve answers cryptically, and Nancy looks up at him suspiciously. Steve pretends to ignore the look. “What are you making?”

Nancy looks down at the box of cake mix. It’s yellow cake mix, but Steve knows for a fact there’d been a Black Forest one in the bag, too. “Figured we could make something to keep us busy,” she says with a shrug. “I forgot to ask if you had any eggs, though.”

“Got’em,” Steve quips and jumps off the counter to retrieve them. It’s just as he’s handing them over to Nancy from the fridge that the music flips from _Led Zeppelin_ to _The Clash_, and Nancy and Steve grin at each other. Nancy accepts the eggs, and Steve wanders back over to the goods.

He rummages around a little in the bag, then grabs the bottle of rum and looks down at it forlornly, cramming a Snickers into his mouth.

He didn’t drink much anymore. It reminded him too much of the time he was pumped full of truth serum, and he’d be the first to tell you it wasn’t any fun being drunk off your ass when all you could do was sit there and worry about how long it’ll take to wear off and swear you see someone standing in the doorways, waiting to take you away for questioning again. At least while he was on the truth serum, he’d felt light and happy, uncaring, really, about the things being done to him. He was too aware when he was drunk, even once he was plastered enough to not remember his own middle name, and some part of him refused to shut down that section of his brain.

He thinks it’s probably something like a survival instinct, but Steve’s never been very good at the whole self-preservation thing, so he can’t be sure on that one.

“That candy isn't for you, dingus,” Robin says as she bursts into the scene, smacking Steve on the shoulder. Steve tries to swat her away and fails. Jonathan follows, and he looks just a little smug. Steve raises his eyebrows at him, mouth still stuffed with candy, and Jonathan only mimics the expression back.

“Whas da point if we can’d ead da goods?” Steve slurs, his mouth full, and everyone makes sure he knows how disgusting that is. Robin checks him with an elbow into his gut, and he starts laughing hard enough that he almost chokes.

“Anyone know how to crack an egg without getting the shell everywhere?” Nancy asks nonchalantly as Steve struggles with himself. Robin raises her hand, and together, with Jonathan eventually patting Steve on the back to help him along, they bake a goddamn cake.

* * *

The cake burns, but Steve’s pretty sure that’s Robin’s fault. She’s no Chef Boyardee, but none of them are, and Jonathan’s actually the most adept at handling an oven out of the four of them.

Nonetheless, they leave Robin the task of checking on the cake to make sure it’s baked all the way through, and she fails, because why else would it be burned on three of four sides?

“I can fix it,” Robin declares, and Steve knows she absolutely cannot, but that doesn’t stop her from whipping out a tub of icing, stacking the two cakes on top of each other, and slathering it all with the entirety of the can.

They watch from the sidelines as she wrestles the cake into a bigger monstrosity than it had been to start, Nancy and Jonathan with a beer each in hand and Steve with a face of distinct horror at what Robin was creating.

“Is that fixing it?” Steve asks hesitantly once she’s done, and Robin throws the iced spatula at his head in return.

It turns into a little bit of an icing fight from there, halted only when the doorbell starts ringing with kids in costumes and sacks at the ready for their treats, the children eyeing Steve in amusement or confusion, or sometimes disgust, when he shows up at the door with icing smeared up his face (white icing—though he’s not exactly sure that’s much better than chocolate).

Nancy’s got a beer held his way when he walks back to the kitchen, breathing in the thick scent of burned baked goods slathered in sugar, and he hesitates. Hates the way the idea of drinking alone makes him feel like his bones are turning to liquid, makes the side of his head throb sharp and sudden.

Hates the way it makes Nancy hesitate in turn when something on his face changes at the sight of it.

He swallows. And then he reaches for the bottle.

Fuck the Russians. Fuck them all to the Upside Down.

* * *

They start up the movies, picked randomly from the copious pile Robin and Steve had managed to procure thanks to both their job and the fact Steve’s parents used their house as more of a base to stop by than as what it actually was. All horror, all varying degrees of slasher and gore and psychological, and Steve settles in the haze of it all as Jason tries his best to take out a door with an axe. His heart thumps beneath the feel of the alcohol, but he doesn’t feel quite the same as he had those other times he tried to wipe all the fear away with a bottle of Jack.

He feels—safe.

Despite being in the same place as he was the last time he’d tried and failed, he feels completely different, with Robin sprawled on a Lay-Z boy in the corner with a bowl of candy taking up her whole lap and Jonathan crammed in the loveseat next to him, Nancy on Jonathan’s other side and half in his lap.

He feels, dare he say it, like this is where he belongs. King Steve, watching movies with a band nerd, a social outcast, and the girl who stole his heart.

If he weren’t under the influence, he’d probably bother to give that a little more thought, but he doesn’t. He’s done enough thinking over the past few years, and he didn’t see the need to start it up right now.

He gets up to change the movie over, _Poltergeist_ next on the list, and then nearly wipes out on his way back to the couch, stepping in one of the empty popcorn bowls, but Robin, two beers in just like he was, jumps to his rescue and manages to keep him from face planting into the side table.

“All hands on deck,” she quips gleefully, guiding him out of the bowl and taking it away once he’s free.

Jonathan steadies Steve with a hand on his arm once Robin releases him, sliding it down to his wrist as he finally comes within range of his seat, and Steve falls into the couch with a _whump_.

“I missed you guys,” Jonathan sighs once Steve is situated and the movie has started. He’s holding Nancy close, but his hand is still firmly wrapped around Steve’s wrist, and his fingers are branding their mark on Steve’s skin. Steve knows he can’t actually feel it, but he knows the scar, the one he shares with Nancy, is there on Jonathan’s palm, and it almost feels hotter than any other part of the hold.

The movie plays on, and Steve loses himself to the warmth of the companionship around him.

There are things you can run from, and then there are things that will follow you to the end of your days. Some of them are dark, demons that curl in your mind and threaten to overtake you when you’re at your weakest—and some of them are good. Some of them are people, friends you can go to whenever something doesn’t feel right, friends you can down an entire round of six packs with and laugh until the sun came up and you realized, as the light was filtering in and someone was snoring softly in your ear, that you didn’t have a moment to be afraid of the things that plagued you all.

There are things that will follow you to the end of your days—and Steve thinks he’s found them in the people that surround him now.

And he doesn’t have the words to say how much he needs that.


	4. human shield

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note for Billy sympathy, since I've been told that's not accepted around some parts.
> 
> Feel free to skip this one if you're not big on Billy!

“I want to say goodbye,” El tells them the first day she’s back. She’s holding a magazine, flipped open to an ad for perfume or something, and her finger points to something in the background.

They all look at her, and then they look at each other.

Then Joyce says, quietly, “I think that’s a great idea.”

And they make paper lanterns.

* * *

Winter is the worst, Steve thinks. It’s cold, there’s ice ruining the sidewalks and salt ruining the paint job on his car, and there’s dark, dead trees lining every road that don’t do anything for the nightmares of creatures with spindly legs and giant, gaping maws he still has on the regular. Not to mention that the snowfall is too reminiscent of the tunnels he’d traversed with the kids, and he had a hard time finding any beauty in it like everyone else still seemed to be able to.

Winter is the worst, and Steve would really like to get that part of the year over with.

It’s too cold to make the candle boats El originally wanted to make to remember the people that had been taken from them—the lakes are all frozen over, and a stream doesn’t feel like it would do justice—so they make paper lanterns out of old coat hangers and wax paper, and they write messages all along the outsides before they gather to set them free.

That night, everyone is there in the clearing behind the Byers’ old house—the house no one had bought, but that Joyce didn’t feel comfortable returning to just yet, even when she knew it would be cheaper than staying at the old Motel 6—even Robin, despite the protest she had given when Steve had first invited her.

She had caved pretty easily when Steve told her he wanted her there, so he thinks she wasn’t that against the idea, and she stands alongside him and Nancy and Jonathan as Joyce fumbles with a lighter and gets everything ready to go, her black boots gathering the wayward flakes that fall from the glittering sky and her blue and white knit scarf Steve knows her grandma made for her wrapped tight over her chin. The sight of her makes Steve burrow deeper in the comfort of his own sherpa-lined jacket, wishing he’d thought to wear a scarf, too.

“Ha!” Joyce calls suddenly, victorious, as a small flame licks to life from the lighter in her one ungloved fist.

They start with Barb’s.

Nancy kicks off with a speech that almost seems pre-planned with how well it comes out, but there's a vein of spontaneity to it that lets Steve know she’s making it up on the spot as she goes.

Between the three of them—him, Nancy, and Jonathan—standing around Barb’s lantern to release it, Nancy’s the only one not shying away from the story that had passed over two years ago now. Jonathan keeps his eyes averted even before Nancy gets to the parts where Barb was taken from her, her best friend, the person she wishes she would have listened to if only so she’d maybe be alive right now, and Steve finds he can’t keep his expression stoic to save his life.

When he reaches up to hold an end of the lantern, he feels his heart stuck in his throat, and he says, with a choked voice, “I’m sorry. You knew better than all of us stupid teenagers, Barb. And we let you die for it.”

Nancy looks at Steve, startled, and Jonathan stares at him like he’s seeing a ghost. Steve cracks a wry smile. “Also? You were one hell of a best friend. Wish I could have seen you shoot a beer with us. As—not friends, but. Y’know.” Steve shrugs. “People.”

Nancy chokes on a laugh, and Jonathan gives him a smile that hesitates as it’s formed, and, together, they let Barb’s lantern go.

Bob is next, and Nancy holds Steve’s hand as they return to the crowd standing in the frozen grass, leaving Jonathan to wait for his mom and Will.

Steve doesn’t really listen to Bob’s parts. His ears are still ringing from Barb’s, from the way he had to think about what he’d had a hand in. He feels Robin shift next to him, her boots quietly squeaking in the grass.

Bob’s part ends, and Jonathan returns with Will in tow to swap out for El. Will breaks to go with his huddle of friends while Jonathan squeezes in between Nancy and Steve. It’d be suspicious if it were anyone but Jonathan.

“You alright?” Steve suddenly hears whispered to him, and he blinks over in Jonathan’s direction to find him watching Steve with wet eyes.

Steve nods. “Yeah,” he replies, hushed. “Yeah.”

Hopper’s is … long. Joyce has a lot to say about the man she knew, about the man who hunted the ends of the town for her son, about the man who lost so much and still took El in when she needed him, even if she didn’t know it.

Joyce has a lot to say about Jim Hopper, and Steve listens to it all with his head bowed. When Hop’s lantern is released, she turns and accepts a second one from Dustin, and El returns to Mike’s side.

Steve doesn’t really know who this one is for. All he can gather as Joyce talks shortly, but mournfully, is that it’s for a man she knew for a very brief period of time named Alexei, who not only helped them greatly when it came time to save the world, but, in the end, lost his chance to be what they all already were: an American.

Steve doesn’t know what that would have made him to start, but he has a strong suspicion it might have been something that started with an R, considering how things went in Hawkins, and he decidedly doesn’t hold that against the dead man. After all, he was dead, and Steve, somehow, had not had that same unfortunate fate.

Robin shifts on her feet again, catching Steve’s attention, and when he looks at her, she looks back at him like she thinks she’s not supposed to be there, and Steve reaches out and pulls her under his arm. From his other side, Jonathan looks over at the movement, then up at Steve, and he nods once like he gets it.

Joyce lets Alexei’s lantern go, and there’s only one left to say goodbye to.

They all conjure around the lantern when it’s Billy’s turn. No one has to say anything, they all just start to move, collecting around and watching when Max holds the lantern aloft and immediately starts to cry. Lucas puts an arm around her, and Joyce rubs her back.

“Billy—” Max chokes through her tears. “He was a dick. He was mean, and he didn’t know how to stop. But he—he was my brother. He was the brother I thought I wanted when Mom told me she was getting remarried.”

She stops. Sniffles. Inhales on a little whimper, and then pushes on.

Steve wonders when the fuck the children got so strong.

“He was a horrible person on the outside,” she spits, “but that wasn’t the real Billy.” She looks at El and hesitates, then drops her eyes. “Not the one he wanted to be, not really.”

El nods, wrapped up in a pink blanket, her hair a cloud around her and speckled with snowflakes.

“He had a lot he was hiding from me, from—from everyone, I guess. He wasn’t allowed to be the person he really wanted to be as a kid, and that changed him as a teenager. Maybe—” She stops again to breathe, and Steve hunches closer into his jacket. He feels a hand slip into his pocket, and looks to his side to find Nancy looking up at him with wide eyes. He holds the hand tight. “Maybe he didn’t know that. Maybe he thought he was who his dad wanted him to be and that’s all there was. I don’t know. I didn’t— We didn’t talk about important things. But I think the real Billy was there. At the end.”

“When it mattered,” Mike tacks on, looking like a giraffe wrapped in a navy marshmallow as he stands there in his thick winter coat. He’s crying, too. They all are, Steve thinks. For the douchebag no one liked, all because he was the one to save them in the end. For the person they saw no reason to hate anymore when he was the one who didn’t get to see the after.

Because he was the most recent loss, and they all were sick to death of losing people.

“He protected me,” El whispers into her blanket. Her face shines with tears.

“He was a straight up badass. He stood there and took on that bastard flayer like a— like a _knight_, he was your shield,” Lucas says, choking his way through the words. He scrubs a hand across his wet eyes. “It was so cool.”

“Hero,” El concludes gently.

“A hero,” they all agree, and then they let the lantern go.

* * *

They break and reconvene at Mike and Nancy’s house, Joyce rejecting the offer to stay with everyone and leaving the kids to Mrs. Wheeler’s devices when it came too late to stay awake any longer. Robin leaves, too, and Steve almost follows her, until a hand on his shoulder and his name curled on Nancy’s lips stops him, and realizes he’s not meant to depart just yet. Joyce offers to take Robin home in his stead, and Steve promises to call her in the morning (but not before ten, she warns firmly, because she wasn’t going to be awake for anyone before ten).

The kids take over the basement, and Jonathan, Nancy, and Steve abscond to Nancy’s room. Her mom makes her leave the door open even as she goes to bed for the night, but none of them care. They weren’t here to do that kind of thing.

They sit on her bed quietly—Nancy changed into her pink pajamas and Jonathan into a gray shirt and sleep pants, Steve still in his jeans with the intention of leaving at some point—and they go through their old yearbooks, pulled from the depths of Nancy’s closet. Jonathan points out which ones he took and submitted, usually anonymously, even though the whole school knew Jonathan was obsessed with his camera, and Steve is reminded that, even though Jonathan pulled the creep move of the century way back when, he was a really good photographer at the end of it.

Nancy falls asleep first, her hand loosely curled around a photo of her and Barb pulled from her cork board. Steve and Jonathan don’t notice at first, too busy shuffling through their respective handfuls of photos procured from various corners of Nancy’s room. It’s only when Jonathan tries to hand her one of Mike in his Ghostbusters costume that he realizes, and they start at putting everything away.

“You should stay,” Jonathan tells Steve gently, his voice so hushed and rough that it’s a wonder it doesn’t break as he speaks. “The snow’s coming down hard. You shouldn’t be out in it at night.”

Steve looks down at the photos in his hand, then out the window. Jonathan’s right—it’s started snowing hard.

“I don’t know,” Steve hedges. “Not exactly my scene to be anymore, y’know?”

Jonathan looks up at him. His eyes are dark as ever. Steve can’t look away.

“We’d both like it better if you’d stayed, Steve,” Jonathan says firmly. “No one … gives a shit what kind of scene you’re supposed to be in. All of that is done with. Forget it.”

Steve watches Jonathan, watches him watching him back, and he can see the fight in those dark irises that he hadn’t seen since—

“Okay,” Steve agrees hurriedly, pushing away the sound of the Demogorgon screaming in fire. “Okay. Yeah. I’ll stay.”

Jonathan sags with relief, dropping his head again, and removes the last of the photos and books off to the side of the bed. Steve stands up as he starts pulling the covers back, and Jonathan freezes. He looks almost accusing when his eyes dart back up to Steve’s, and Steve holds his hands up in surrender.

“Just going downstairs to get something to drink,” he pleads, and Jonathan’s narrow eyes search him for a moment before he nods and allows him to leave.

He’s almost certain Jonathan falls asleep not long after Steve leaves for the kitchen, because he doesn’t come looking, not even after Steve’s decided not to come back up.

* * *

Steve’s still up when Max emerges from the basement, standing in the kitchen and staring into the murky depths of a mug filled with coffee that was probably from the morning before. He didn’t want to sleep yet, if at all, but he also didn’t want to betray his word to Jonathan and return to his house, only to listen to the snow pile up on the roof. He’s in the middle of arguing with himself over just going back up to the room and dealing with what it would do to him when she quietly padded her way out, wrapped in a green blanket that only amplified the red of her hair, and Steve nearly startles out of his skin when he finally catches sight of her.

“Jesus _christ_,” he hisses, clutching his chest. “Send me into cardiac arrest to end the night off right, why don’t you.”

Max doesn’t answer. She stands there for a moment in her blanket, watching him warily, and Steve drops his hand and watches her back.

Then, out of nowhere, she starts to cry again, and Steve, so unused to seeing the tough redhead of the group do anything more than stand tall, immediately pushes away from the counter and pulls her into a hug.

“H-hey,” he tries, stumbling, because he wasn’t good at this kind of shit and, also, this kid was like fourteen, and he didn’t want to make it creepy. “It’s alright, Max. It’s okay.”

“He didn’t deserve that,” Max whispers into Steve’s shoulder, and Steve snaps his mouth shut, waiting for her to say more and explain what she meant. “He was a jerk, but he tried to be himself when he wasn’t being Neil, and Neil wouldn’t let him. He didn’t deserve the monster.”

Her brother, Steve realizes. She’s talking about Billy.

Steve feels the pain of her words wrack through his bones. It shocks him, because he didn’t like Billy. Billy wasn’t nice to Steve, had berated him and taunted him when he’d first showed up. Had beaten the shit out of him at the Byers’ house over a move that admittedly Steve probably could have handled better, now that he looked back on it and realized how creepy it all seemed from the outside, Steve’s involvement with his little sister when Billy didn’t know what kind of monsters were sitting just behind the curtain.

Billy was what Steve could have been, had his own father been just a step worse that what he was.

Billy was fucked up, but did he really deserve the end he got because of the way the world failed him?

“No,” Steve murmurs back to Max, holding her tight, and he feels the way she relaxes against him with relief. “No, he didn’t.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the record: I’m team “Billy better still be alive or so help me god”


	5. gunpoint

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry some of these are so short by the way, guys. I'm a slow ass writer normally, and writing a prompt a day is proving to be more difficult than I remember it being.
> 
> I'm having fun, though!

Steve feels like, by now, he should have known it wasn’t all over.

He should have known that, when you get captured by Russians and some of those Russians probably got away, they were going to come back for you whether you liked it or not.

He should have known better than to think, after consecutive years of all this bullshit happening, that it was never really over, and he shouldn’t have let his guard down like he had.

And Steve feels, as he stares down the black eyes of a shotgun pointed at his face, that, really, he should never have trusted Nancy with a gun.

* * *

It starts when Will has _the feeling_ again.

Joyce pulls him and El out of school and throws them into the car, Jonathan included, and they bolt back to Hawkins after warning Nancy of their incoming arrival.

And Nancy, being the type of person she was, takes over the situation in full and then some.

Nancy calls everyone up—_everyone,_ minus Robin, who was ordered into work by Keith and would have to play catch-up later—and informs them there’s a mandatory meeting at the junkyard, and that they were all about to learn how to shoot a goddamn gun, or so help her.

“We’ve managed to keep ourselves safe this far,” she says sternly, marching along the line where she’s had them all stand in a row, a number of different guns in styles Steve couldn’t name if he tried sitting along a rusted out cage that was once a car, a pistol in her hand. “But we never know when that’s going to change. We shouldn’t have relied on El as much as we had.” She gives El a nod, and El looks away. Her superpowers hadn’t come back yet, and she was obvious about her discomfort regarding it. “But we did. And now we’re here, possibly with another problem on our hands if Will’s premonition—”

“It’s just a feeling,” Will cuts in quietly.

“It’s a warning that could save our asses,” Nancy assures him firmly. She turns back to face everyone again. “It gives us time to prepare, just in case. And we need to learn how to defend ourselves in the best way we can. And that means learning how to shoot a gun and not take someone’s head off in the process.”

“Unless it’s a monster,” Dustin tacks on.

Nancy nods at him. “Unless it’s a monster.”

Everyone in line, minus Steve and Jonathan, look at each other. They all had seen Nancy in action, and she was a force to be reckoned with when she had a firearm in her arsenal.

“I think I get by pretty well with my Wrist Rocket,” Lucas offers smugly, then whips it out and aims it at the bus. “Wha-chaaaaa!” he adds for effect, and then lets it loose. His ammo, whatever it was, knocks against the metal exterior of the bus a second later with a considerable bang.

Nancy looks at him, sighs, and then lifts the handgun she was still holding and shoots a hole through the bus. Lucas blanches, and Nancy only looks at him as she slowly lowers the weapon.

“You’re great with your slingshot, Lucas—”

“Wrist Rocket,” Lucas corrects, sounding like he had something caught in his throat.

“—Wrist Rocket,” Nancy amends, “but we have to try to _kill_ these things. Bullets are more likely to do that.”

Lucas nods jerkily.

“What if we like explosives better?” Will asks tentatively from the other end of the line. Jonathan and Joyce both give Will startled looks, but Will doesn’t waver. “Like … the fireworks,” he adds. “What if we could engineer a mechanism to fire explosives instead of using a gun?”

Nancy seems to mull that over. She nods a few times. “Actually, yeah, that could work.”

Lucas lights up. “Like a giant Wrist Rocket!”

“Like a catapult!” the Party all says at once, and then rush to high-five each other.

“Wait, wait, wait, wait!” Dustin cuts in excitedly. “I have this awesome pressurized potato launcher, I bet if we can find something potato-shaped_ and _filled with gunpowder, we could use that!”

“Wouldn’t dynamite sticks just work?” Max asks.

“I don’t know if I like the sound of a pressurized explosive…” Joyce tries, but to no avail as the kids all start talking excitedly over each other at the idea of making one for each member of the party.

“Is that really any different from a gun?” Steve makes the mistake of asking, and then proceeds to get lectured for the next hour on how wrong he was.

* * *

The kids go running off once they’ve decided Steve has had enough and they each have fired at least enough of the guns to catch two cans apiece (which they all were surprisingly good at, which immediately makes Steve varying degrees of very uncomfortable), and Joyce decidedly grabs one of the shotguns and follows after them, but not before warning Jonathan not to shoot himself in the foot or somewhere worse. Nancy stands defeated by the sidelines, looking put out at everyone leaving before she could convince them two cans wasn’t enough.

Jonathan glowers at his mom a little as she retreats, smiling in that way she always did when she was teasing one of the kids, and Steve thinks about how much better she’s slowly been getting each time he sees her.

When it’s only him, Nancy, and Jonathan left in the junkyard with the rest of the armory, Nancy orders them to swap out their gun for a different one (Jonathan: a pistol for the rifle, and Steve: the shotgun, which Nancy takes, for a pistol), and together he and Jonathan practice at shooting cans off of the roof of one of the cars. Jonathan proves to be better at it than Steve, and Steve isn’t by any means quiet about his disappointment at sucking.

“I swear I’m just having an off day,” he says as he sets the gun down and dusts his front off like there was any reason to. “Besides, I probably should just stick to good ol’ faithful. I’ve kicked a lot of ass with that baby, she sticks close to me at all times.”

Jonathan gives him a curious look. “You mean the bat I put nails in?”

“The very one. Thanks for letting me keep it.”

“Hey.” Jonathan shrugs. “You do handle it better.”

“Exactly.” Steve kicks a wayward can, wandering a short circle in the dirt as he surveys the area he’d already been in for over three hours, then fakes a yawn. “You know what? I think I’ll be okay with whatever comes. Nothing can surprise me anymore. I’ve been through all that shit, I think I’m good to go.”

He turns to give Jonathan a cocky smile, and doesn’t even notice Nancy moving behind him until she’s already there.

She smashes the butt of her shotgun against the inside of Steve’s knee and he goes down hard, his shoulder colliding with the hard earth and sending his ears ringing. He thinks he hears Jonathan shout _“Nancy!”_ at her in shock, but he can’t be sure.

“You need to be ready for anything, Harrington,” she tells him gravely once he’s pulled his face from the ground, and then levels him with the muzzle. He blinks into the two black holes that look too much like empty eyes to be anything less than chilling on top of outright terrifying, and he feels his heart stop cold in his chest.

He breathes loudly, maybe slightly panicking, the noise of him pulling in air a wheeze through the sudden, scary silence.

Then Nancy’s breathing hitches, and his eyes snap up to her face.

“I can’t lose you, too, Steve Harrington,” she whispers, her cheeks wet beneath the stock of the gun she has pressed to her face. “You have to be prepared. I have to make sure you’re prepared.”

Steve stares up at her. She doesn’t lower the gun, nor does she look away from him, not even when Jonathan hesitantly runs to his side and helps him up. It’s only once he’s backed away a few steps that the muzzle lowers an inch, then one more, and then she drops her stance completely.

Steve takes a tentative step towards her, and then another, and then closes the distance in a rush the moment he’s sure he was going to be threatened at gunpoint again. He wraps her up in a hug, careful of the gun she still keeps clutched in one hand, and doesn’t say a word.

Jonathan hovers by the sidelines, looking worried, and maybe a little terrified of what his girlfriend is capable of. Steve glances up at him once, then sighs and opens an arm to join him in.

“Get in here,” he beckons, and Jonathan hesitates, just like Robin had that day with Nancy’s unexpected arrival, and, instead of doing what he’d done for Robin, Steve merely grabs the front of Jonathan’s shirt and forces him in.

They stay huddled together for an indeterminate amount of time, silent and no better at managing a three-person hug than before, until the temperature starts to drop and the shadows start to turn to night. They stay, they hold, and they simply breathe together, Jonathan just as comfortable to squeeze against as Robin had been, though Steve doesn’t really think much about that part, and they allow the tension of Will’s premonition ease away.

It’s quiet, and it’s necessary, and it’s something they never got enough of in life after what they’d all been through.

It’s quiet, it’s necessary, and, for the moment, it’s enough.

And then the Demogorgan shows up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Had to do it to 'em.


	6. dragged away

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoops, sorry guys! Pasted the wrong chapter in. Here's the right one!

They don’t see it right away. It blends nearly seamlessly into the dark of the night, it’s maw folded shut like the petals of a demented man-eating flower bud, crawling forth on four legs like a Demodog despite clearly not being one. Jonathan is the first to notice it, his eyes suddenly growing wide, and Nancy and Steve follow shortly behind.

“WHAT THE F—” Jonathan yells, twisting towards the creature, and everyone jumps into motion like a well-oiled machine. Jonathan leaps for the pistol he’d placed on the ground before helping Steve up in the same motion Nancy lifts her shotgun and takes aim, while Steve, well, uses his frankly questionable instincts to grab a discarded arm-length sliver of what was probably once a wooden beam and start charging at the thing.

Nancy shoots it twice before he can even get close.

It roars, pushing back onto its two legs, mouth opening up into a violent scream, and Steve backs up again a few steps, his giant makeshift stake clutched between his grip. They watch, tensed, as it stumbles back a foot, swaying.

Something about it is—_wrong. _

It doesn’t look right. It’s not just the limping gait, the clear injury it had to one of its legs in the form of thick black veins spidering up, or the fact it was even there when the gate was firmly closed—it’s also … a strange color. A sickly, grayish looking green, rendered nearly black by both the cover of the night and the injury that seemed to only move up the length of its body with every passing moment.

“Something’s wrong with it,” Steve says, feeling like his heart is in his throat.

“It looks like it’s … _poisoned_,” Nancy says. But, before they can think on that further, the thing lunges, covering the distance to Steve in one bound.

Steve immediately starts screaming, throwing his hands, and the wooden spike, up in a futile attempt at protecting himself. It lands on him like a sack of concrete, knocking him into the ground and winding him so fiercely he feels like he’s already died. He thinks he hears his name being screamed by Nancy and Jonathan, but the sudden teeth around his leg keeps him from being able to register anything but the sudden sharp pain.

Fucking hell, he was going to die.

Right here. Right now.

He was going to actually die.

He thinks the pain of the teeth in his ankle can’t get any worse when the thing starts to drag him rather than eat him, growling around the foot it had firmly stuck in its mouth as a cacophony of endless screaming, courtesy of not only Steve but also Nancy and Jonathan as they said something unintelligible to each other, and maybe to him, too. That hurts infinitely worse than just having the teeth in his leg, because now the teeth are latched in, ruining the fabric of his jeans and the flesh on his bones in one fell swoop.

Steve thinks maybe he’ll never stop screaming.

The sound of a gun going off shatters the air, and it’s immediately the most beautiful thing Steve’s ever heard in his life. He feels more than hears the Demogorgan start to howl around his leg, telling him at least his nerve endings were still working and his foot was still nice and attached, and his head rings sharply with the thunder of his pain.

He remembers, faintly, somewhere in the back of his head where none of this was happening, that El had gotten bitten once, too, by the meatier of the monsters they’d faced, and he thinks, _Dammit, a little girl is stronger than me. How the hell am I going to live that down?_

The thing stops dragging him, only because Nancy has shot it at least two more times and is rapidly advancing, shooting again and again while Jonathan hovered by her, his dirty shoes the only thing in Steve’s peripheral vision that tells him so. Nancy shoots again, and again, and again, and that’s when Steve realizes she’s standing right above him.

The Demogorgan rears back and howls above them, and that’s when he blacks out completely.

* * *

When he comes to again, he finds himself looking up into the sweaty face of Jonathan, who, really, has definitely looked better. Steve’s pretty sure his head is in Joanthan’s lap, because he’s had his head in a fair number of laps before, and this definitely felt like one. He can feel Jonathan’s calloused, clammy hands pressed against his cheeks, and he scrunches up his face in equal parts confusion and pain.

_Fuck_, his leg hurt.

“—eve?” Jonathan’s lips are moving, but Steve can’t really comprehend anything coming out from between them. All he can really think is, damn, guy’s got some skinny lips. Way different from Nancy’s. Were Steve’s that thin? Did Nancy _like_ thin lips? Did _Steve_ like thin lips? He can’t really recall, and it would be rude of him to just find out right this second, because Jonathan was spoken for.

Wait. And also a guy.

Wait.

_Wait._

Jonathan is saying _his_ name. Okay. That makes sense.

“Huh?” Steve finally says, blinking up at Jonathan’s pale face, feeling like his mouth was filled with molasses and his brain, cotton. “What?”

Jonathan’s face immediately relaxes with relief. “Jesus. Scared the hell out of me for a second there. Thought you were a goner.”

And then Steve remembers.

“Nancy!” he shouts, rocketing up so fast he nearly collides with Jonathan’s chin, and then he falls back again, his head swirling with pain.

He promptly leans over and deposits the contents of his stomach on the cold, hard dirt.

“Shit!” Jonathan spits, grabbing Steve’s shoulders. “Fuck, shit, no. No, don’t tell me you have a concussion. How the _hell_ are we going to explain a monster bite to the hospital?”

“Nancy,” Steve croaks, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “Where the hell is Nancy, Jonathan? Where’s the fucking _Demogorgan?”_

“She chased it into the woods. Stop moving, Steve! If you have a concussion, you shouldn’t be—”

“I don’t give a star-spangled _shit_ what I shouldn’t be doing, man!” Steve growls, knocking Jonathan’s hands away. “Your girlfriend just went running off after a goddamn monster, and you’re telling me to sit still? Are you out of your _mind?!”_

“She has your car!” Jonathan explains quickly, still trying to replace his hands even though Steve keeps knocking them away. “She went after it in your car, okay? Trying to see where it was going.”

Steve pauses. Frowns. Then blanches.

“_My _car?!” he repeats, and he sounds like a prepubescent girl.

“It was the only option?” Jonathan tries, looking like a kid busted for getting into the cookie jar at home, if Jonathan had ever been that kind of kid in the first place.

He’s saved from whatever conniption Steve was about to go through by a set of highbeams nearly blinding both of them permanently as Steve’s car (with Nancy presumedly behind the wheel, not that he could _see_ her) rolling up. The engine cuts while Steve’s trying to rub the sight back into his eyes, and he hears the door open.

“Oh, thank god, he’s awake.” Definitely Nancy. “Steve? Hey, how’s your head?”

“My head is fine, it’s my leg that’s the issue.” Though he still can’t see very much beyond the giant spots in his vision, he squints in Nancy’s direction. “What is _wrong_ with you?” he barks, gesturing furiously to the general direction of the car. “You went after it? Someone here is out of their mind, and it’s not me!”

Nancy doesn’t even sound a little mollified when she replies, “I was fine, Steve. It had like eight bullets in its face mouth thing and two in its good leg. Only barely outran the car.”

_“Nancy!”_ Steve cries.

_“I_ was chasing_ it_, Steve,” she says in exasperation. “I just lost it. I didn’t get to find out where it came from.”

“Fucking hell,” Steve moans quietly, dropping his face into his palms.

“He might have a concussion,” Jonathan whispers to Nancy, despite the fact that Steve was right there and could obviously hear him. Jeez, did they think Steve was partially deaf or something?

“We can’t take him to the hospital until we make sure there’s nothing weird about the wound.”

“Mom can look at it, she’ll know what to do.”

“Good idea. We should call her on the payphone and meet her somewhere before we take him.”

“I’m right here,” Steve cuts in grumpily. They both look at him, and he almost feels bad, because they look exhausted, worried, and about ready to keel over themselves. He sighs and shifts around, then grimaces when his leg screams in protest. “Just tell her to meet us at my place. The ‘rents aren’t going to be home for another week. We can use the house as a home base until then without worrying someone will bother us.”

Nancy and Jonathan look at each other. Jonathan shrugs, and Nancy nods her head.

“Okay, good idea,” she says, then turns towards Steve’s legs. “Let me look at that before we get you into the car. If it’s broken, we’ll probably want to splint it before moving you.”

Steve watches as she starts to gingerly peel back what was left of his left pants leg. It burns like a lick of hellfire, and he tries not to do more than only grimace. “When the hell did you get so good at medical shit?” he asks, only kind of as a distraction for himself.

Nancy gives him a wry smile. “When Max told me I was cleaning a wound wrong and I realized that really could have fucked us over.”

Honestly, not the worst reason, Steve thinks, and lets Nancy do her thing.

His leg isn’t broken, thank god, but Jesus _Christ_ does it hurt to stand on. They both end up half-carrying him over to the car, and he nearly feels the need to vomit again on the short way there.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to carry you?” Jonathan asks hesitantly, bearing the most of Steve’s weight, and Steve jerks his head in Jonathan’s direction to glare at him.

“Don’t you _dare_. I’m not some damsel in distress. I’m pretty, but I’m no fucking princess.”

Jonathan blinks at Steve a few times, then gives a half-startled laugh Steve can’t decipher.

“Watch your head,” Nancy warns, possibly for both Steve and Jonathan equally, since Jonathan smacked Steve’s head against the car the last time he helped Steve get into it, and into the car Steve goes.

Jonathan ends up in the back with Steve, who can’t handle the seatbelts and nearly passes out each time his leg jostles against the seat of the car, and helps keep him steady as Nancy drives carefully, but fast, as she locates a phone booth and proceeds to call Joyce. When she returns, she looks like she’s about to drop right then and there, and, really, Steve thinks he might just, too.

“I vote we stay the whole night at Steve’s place tonight,” Nancy says tiredly, and Jonathan and Steve nod their heads without even questioning it.


	7. isolation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Canon compliant WHOMST?

Joyce meets them at the house after a rough ride there, during which Steve does black out at least once (only twice if you considered one where he was only out a few seconds, which he doesn’t), and declares Steve’s ankle, once fully cleaned and relieved of the rest of his pants, intact but looking like it got attacked by an animal. _It’ll scar_, she tells him gently, her face so apologetic that Steve almost wishes he hadn’t allowed Nancy and Jonathan to bring her in, _but the material of your jeans saved you from a lot worse, I think._

They take about half an hour to devise a cover story, starting with something maybe too akin to that of Will’s that first time he went missing for anyone to be all that comfortable with, and settle on a rabid coyote attack and hope coyotes could be rabid in the first place before dosing Steve up on painkillers and loading him back into the car. He doesn’t end up remembering much of the drive to the new hospital, rebuilt after the disaster rampage the Mind Flayer had gone on, but, boy, does he remember the stitches they’d had to give him to put all his flesh back where it belonged.

Needles? So not his thing, and he definitely freaked out more than he should have when they brought the syringe of local anesthetic in. He spent the whole time _that_ was going on wishing Robin were there, because she’d have understood. She got the serum, too, and she knew what it was like to live with the aftermath.

They send him on his way with a prescription for an antibiotic (they’d redacted the rabid part of the coyote attack after learning he’d need a huge-ass shot for that), a brace for his leg, and a whole lot of stitches that he tries really hard not to think about when he goes to sleep that night, tucked in his bed next to Nancy, immobile and ordered not to move a goddamned muscle, Harrington, or Jonathan is going to pick you up bridal-style and put you back.

Steve decidedly doesn’t even try to move, and, eventually, he falls under the mixed haze of exhaustion and, frankly, some pretty dope painkillers.

* * *

He wakes up on the forest floor.

Or … what he thought was the forest floor until he opened his eyes and realized everything around him is black and dead and decaying. Definitely not Hawkins, no matter how familiar the setting seemed to be upon first fluttering of the eyes. He jolts into a sitting position, eyes slowly scanning the scene around him. It’s like a nightmare come to life.

It’s quiet, and it’s dark, and it feels wrong.

Steve has no memory of leaving his house.

He slowly tries to push to his feet, only to flinch to a stop when he’s reminded of his injury in the form of a sharp lick of pain up his left side. He tries again, this time easing as much weight off of his leg as he can in the process. He’s close enough to a tree that he can grope onto it for support, but he immediately wants to let it go again when he realizes the state of it.

“Shit,” he hisses softly to himself, pulling away and looking down at his green pajamas, now covered in whatever gross crap was coating the tree. “Where the hell …?”

The trees don’t have any answers for him, and the forest seems deserted of more than just other humans. He can’t hear anything resembling an animal, or even a bug. It’s just … silence. Total, bone-chilling silence.

Steve has never been one to enjoy silence, except maybe when the kids were being a little too obnoxious.

Gritting his teeth against the hot flames that crawl up the left side of his body, Steve pushes himself forward and tries to figure out where the hell he is, and how the hell he got there in the first place.

* * *

He feels like he’s been wandering for hours. Something about the place felt … _untethered_. Like he was on an escalator that never ended, a treadmill that kept him rooted in place while making him feel like he’d walked a thousand miles and more.

It felt real in the same way it all felt unreal. He could feel the way his body struggled with each step he took, the way his leg throbbed with the pain of simply existing, but the world felt stagnant. Like it was a snow globe, shaken and moving, but never changing or evolving into something else—something _more._

It felt so _wrong._

He stops finally, leaning a hand against a particularly goopy tree to catch his breath and ease the weight off of his now-numb leg. He just wants to get out of this place. He doesn’t know where he is, doesn’t know how he got there. Hell, he’s not even sure he remembers falling asleep after Jonathan helped him change out of his clothes into his pajamas for the night, because he was too messed up a mixture of exhaustion and the shit they gave him to do it himself.

It just—doesn’t make sense. Why did nothing make sense anymore?

And he thought English class had been confusing. Jesus.

“Steve?” a vaguely familiar voice calls suddenly, sounding both far away and far too close at the same time, and Steve snaps to attention. He whips his head around, looking for the source, only to find none. “Steve Harrington?”

“Hello?” he calls. His leg throbs as he pushes himself away from the tree and back out into the clearing, the brace continuing to be little protection against his own weight after so much time spent on it without adequate rest. He cups his hands around his mouth and tries, louder, “Hey! Hello!”

Still nothing answers. The air swirls with the weird pollen shit that had swirled around in the creepy tunnel he’d gone through with the kids, and the creepy trees loom over him, dark and haunting. He decides he _really_ hates this place.

“Hey, King Steve,” a new voice, a male voice, calls this time, and Steve abruptly stops in his tracks.

He knows that voice.

“No,” he whispers to himself. “No, nuh uh. Nope. Hell no. I’m dreaming. This is a nightmare!”

“Been a while, hasn’t it?” Behind him. Right behind him. He _knows_ that voice, but it wasn’t possible. There’s no fucking way. “C’mon.” Taunting. No, no. That’s not possible, dammit. There had been a _funeral_. “Tell me that you haven’t _missed_ me.”

He twists around, his leg screaming in protest, and there’s Billy.

Dirty, covered in a black goo that smeared along his cheek, but Billy Hargrove all the same.

He’s not smiling. He looks haunted, his blue eyes wide, mouth turned down into a terrified frown. He stares right at Steve, and Steve’s pretty sure Billy can see right into his soul.

Jesus. Where _is_ he?

“Don’t you miss me, Harrington?” he says, and he sounds like he’s going to break.

Steve points at Billy accusingly. “No! You’re dead, no way, this is not real, holy fucking hell, what is _happening_.”

Billy only stares at him. “You’re terrible at hiding,” he whispers, and his eyes shift their gaze, and that’s when Steve notices a shadow crawling up Billy’s figure, slowly growing and engulfing, and suddenly Steve can no longer breathe.

Suddenly, he can’t feel anything at all.

He turns, slowly, so slowly, to face what was behind him, and _there _is the Demogorgan.

Oh, fuck.

“Oh fuck oh fuckohFUCKOH_FUCK._” Steve twists on his bad leg and bolts, ignoring the way his entire left side zaps with agony, clipping Billy on the shoulder as he passes and sending the other boy flying as he races to get as far away from the Demogorgan as he can. “NANCY?” he cries, as loud as he can, his voice cracking over her name, “JONATHAN? _ANYONE?!”_

He can hear the creature gaining on him, its footsteps swift, perfectly timed with one another, and then Steve realizes, _it’s not injured anymore._

_How_ is it not injured?!

He pushes faster, runs harder, screams through his teeth as he feels himself losing to his injury.

He wasn’t going to make it.

He was going to get caught.

_He wasn’t going to make it._

He doesn’t see the hole until it’s under him.

He falls, and everything goes black and numb.

* * *

He wakes up with a jolt so powerful he could have knocked himself back out had Jonathan not been there, holding him down by the shoulders and watching him with a face pale as death.

“Oh, thank god,” Jonathan breathes, and his surprisingly strong hold on Steve’s shoulders eases. Steve’s hands clutch at Jonathan’s arms, frantically searching them up and down, as he tries to make sure Jonathan was _real._

He’s breathing as if he’d run a marathon, but he can’t bring himself to calm down.

“Hey,” Jonathan starts soothingly the moment he realizes Steve isn’t okay. “Hey, hey, hey. Steve. It’s me. Jonathan. I’m right here. You were having a nightmare.”

“Nigh— Nightmare?” Steve croaks in a sad attempt of a parrot, and then he swallows. His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth.

“Is he awake?” someone else says worriedly, and Nancy appears on the scene, looking disheveled and terrified. She slumps against the doorframe when her eyes meet Steve’s, and Steve feels a slight prickle of guilt for whatever he’d just done. “God dammit, Steve,” she admonishes quietly, then holds her forehead. “You’re going to turn us gray at this rate.”

“What happened?” he tries. His voice still feels like a dried riverbed, and his head is starting to pound.

“You were thrashing,” Jonathan explains, but his eyes are on Nancy as she leaves again for reasons she doesn’t explain beforehand. A moment later, Steve realizes he can hear her talking faintly, and decides she must have called Joyce in a panic. “Woke us up. We were afraid it was the bite or something.” Jonathan closes his eyes and nearly slumps down on Steve’s prone form, his hands still on Steve’s shoulders and Steve’s hands still clutching the fabric of the long-sleeved shirt he wore to bed that night.

“Sorry,” Steve tries, feeling entirely unlike himself. “I guess I should have warned you, I have nightmares sometimes.”

Jonathan’s eyes open again to a dubious look. “Like that?”

Steve presses his lips together and doesn’t answer the question, which then answers it for him. Jonathan sighs. And then he helps Steve sit up.

Steve looks around once he’s mostly upright, his head starting up a rhythmic staccato of ache, and frowns when something about the room occurs to him. “Why are all the lights on?”

“They were, uh,” Jonathan starts, then flushes. “They were flashing. I don’t know. It was a reflex, I guess, from back when—you know. With Will.” He shrugs, looking away. “Yeah. I didn’t think about it, just did it. Must have been something electrical from the storm outside.”

Steve blinks at Jonathan, his explanation slowly registering in his brain as the sound of faint rain echoes in his ears, and then he feels his heart start to sink.

Goosebumps break out all along his skin, and he grows cold all over.

Because the lights had been flashing.

Just like they did when Will was trapped in the Upside Down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This isn’t even remotely the turn I thought I was going to take with this. Probably would have put Jonathan in Steve’s place had I done any outlining and realized maybe alternating POVs would be a good idea if we were bringing the Upside Down back into play.
> 
> Had this been anything but a shoot-the-shit-and-hope-for-the-best daily endeavor, I'd be having an aneurysm right now at my lack of foresight.


	8. stab wound

If there’s one more thing Steve should have walked away with after so many incidents with the otherworldly, it’s to never trust the slow points.

They were only ever a blanket of lies, covering up a brewing storm.

Too bad Steve never learns.

* * *

Steve doesn’t end up telling anyone about his—_nightmare_. He doesn’t care how real it felt. When there were bigger things to worry about that were happening in the midst of it all, a bad dream really didn’t stack up against a living Demogorgan.

So he doesn’t say anything, and when Joyce comes by in the morning to make sure they were all in one piece still, he twists his lips into as reassuring as a smile as he can, which isn’t all that hard, now that he’s been working retail a little too long. And things move on.

The kids are forbidden by Joyce to go looking for the monster, and that only spurs them into doing it in a bigger group than initially intended, giving Joyce, Steve, Jonathan, and Nancy all matching strokes when they show up just after sunset covered in dirt and bickering about the lack of evidence they found while searching, and proceed to get one hell of a lecture about their lack of responsibility. They could have at least answered the goddamned radio, Steve tacks on helpfully, one step behind Joyce throughout the whole parental beatdown.

Everything seems … fine, for a little while after that. A few days—which feel like weeks, maybe even months, to the overly-antsy members of the group of people that had their lives ruined by a world that refused to stop haunting them—pass by in relative calm. Steve even has to work two of those days, and Keith begrudgingly allows him to sit in a chair behind the counter due to his leg, but not before being warned he’d have to make up for the lost labor. Robin, who, by the way, completely freaked out when she learned what she’d missed in less than a day’s time, “accidentally” locks Keith in the backroom for a good two hours in return, just for Steve.

He thinks he has the best damn friends he could have asked for, but he doesn’t have to tell them that, because Robin declares that herself on the regular, and Steve does nothing to refute the statement.

All in all, it’s a slow, strangely easy few days. No Demogorgan shows back up, Steve’s nightmares turn back into the simple ones where he’s asked the same question over and over again and then gets hit even when he tells the truth, and he doesn’t even wake up anyone on the night Nancy, Jonathan, and Robin stay following the great locking up of Keith, which is the same day Nancy and Jonathan stop by to let Steve know Nancy’s mom was making way too much food and wanted her to distribute it around, and Robin takes the chance to set up another movie night, this time with lasagna, green beans, and potato chips as the delicacy of choice. Everything goes smoothly. Everything is pretty quiet.

Everything seems pretty okay.

And then Steve gets a call on his radio at six in the morning the day after his sleepover with his friends, and it’s Dustin talking rapidly about someone getting kidnapped.

“Jesus,” Steve hisses, picking up the radio and squinting at the clock. “Hey, dickhead, do you _know_ what time it is?”

“Steve! Holy shit, finally. You sleep like you’re in a coma.”

“Just tell me why the hell you’re bothering me this early in the morning so I can turn you off and go back to sleep.”

“Wouldn’t advise that. Jonathan’s missing.”

Steve hesitates. “What? Where did he go?”

Dustin pauses, and Steve can feel the condescension coming his way. “Do you know what the word ‘missing’ means, Steve?”

“Okay, smartass, you just woke me up, give me a break. Why do you think Jonathan is missing?”

“Will said Jonathan went to their old house last night and spent the night with Nancy after, but Nancy just called and said he never showed up.”

“What?” Steve rubbed his eyes. “That doesn’t mean anything, Dustin, calm down.”

“Uh, yeah it does! Where would Jonathan have gone when we’re on red alert? He doesn’t live here anymore, if you forgot. He’s not just going to mosey on down to the high school or something.”

“Did you check?”

“Yes, I checked! What kind of amateur do you take me for?”

Steve sighs. “Okay, so, maybe he’s just walking around. Doing stuff. He’s always been a weird guy.”

“All night?”

“I don’t know. Maybe?” Steve leans his head back onto his pillow, radio perched by his cheek, and he closes his eyes with the hope Dustin will just shut up before long and let him go back to sleep.

“Steve! He could have been kidnapped! Like Will was?”

That stops Steve in his tracks. “By the Demogorgan?”

Dustin drops his voice. “Or the Russians.”

_Aw_, Steve thinks, as that registers with him as a real potential threat, _fuck._

* * *

He calls up Robin, because she’s still the outlier in a lot of cases, and he would prefer not to have another incident with her unaware of the havoc happening around her when all she is is a short phone call away.

“Do we never get a break?!” Robin cries once he’s relayed the potential emergency, maybe just a tad hysterically, and Steve can only laugh bitterly.

“Not until we’re cold in the ground, sister.”

They don’t call the Sheriff’s station, because getting them involved the last time a Byers went missing wasn’t exactly the wisest decision until Hopper got involved personally, and with Hopper gone, there’s little reason to try it again. So they don’t—at least, not until they think it’s not the monster. (Though, Russian involvement means the state might get involved again, and, by extension, the government, and Steve’s really tired of getting stuck in those kinds of things, so he kind of hopes they just find Jonathan hurt in a ditch or something like the last time he got lost.)

The kids and Joyce go off to look in respective places, while Steve, Robin, and Nancy decide to look into the house again and the yard behind it. It’s a slow ride there, mostly because they’re scanning the streets as they drive, hoping to find _something_, but they get there eventually. Robin helps Steve out of the car while Nancy goes on ahead.

“What do you think we’re getting into this time, Stevie?” Robin jokes lightly as she eases Steve’s injured leg out for him, his hands braced against the roof and door of the car. “Think it’s a false alarm?”

“Hope it is,” Steve admits. “Knowing Hawkins, though? Most likely isn’t. I just hope he’s okay.”

Robin gives Steve a knowing look, to which Steve only frowns back at her.

“What?” he asks, because he doesn’t understand the context.

But Robin only smirks and shakes her head. “Nothing. We all hope he’s okay. C’mon, let’s catch up with Nancy.”

“Ladies first,” Steve says, gesturing her ahead while he locks his car, then limps along after her into the house. She vanishes into the shadows just as she crosses the threshold into the lamp-less, empty abyss the building offers, and Steve thinks nothing of it. It wasn’t a big house, but it was kind of creepy, especially after everything that happened in it, and the lack of light didn’t help anything.

That, naturally, would be one of many wrong moves he would make that day, because Steve and “catching a break” just didn’t go together. Ever.

The last thing he remembers is his name being half-screamed and then cut off, and then a blanket of black covers his face, followed by a sharp blow to the back of his head, and he’s out.

One of these days, he's going to break the status quo.

* * *

He comes to in a room that looks vaguely familiar, dark and dusty with crates and boxes stacked all along the walls. His back is pressed against a large stack of brown boxes, and he groans, pressing his face into what he’ll realize a split second later to probably be dirty carpet, but won’t give any more shits than he does pre-realization.

“Steve?”

Steve jolts to attention, groaning again when the sharp movement sends everything swirling in his vision. “Yeah, hello?” he tries, slightly worried when his words slur on their own volition.

“Oh, good,” the voices says, and Steve realizes, as it cracks over the second word, that he knows who it is.

_“Jonathan?”_

“Yeah,” Jonathan replies.

Steve pushes himself up, careful of both his head and his leg, and starts to crawl around the boxes. “Holy shit, man, we were looking for you. Where the fuck are we?”

“I don't know. They got me,” Jonathan says, the phantom of anger to his tone, and Steve tries to follow his voice. It’s a lot harder than it seems based on the movies. “While I was in the house, they ambushed me.”

“Did the same to us. We went to look for you and they just—got us.”

Jonathan groans one of his “I thought you were smarter” groans. “You went to the place I was last seen and expected _not_ to get the same treatment? Come on, you—” Jonathan stops abruptly, and Steve stops crawling. “Did you say _us?”_

Oh, Jesus. Steve almost had a heart attack. He starts crawling again, checking around each slow corner he meets. “Did you honestly think Nancy was going to sit out on this one? _You_ come on, man.”

“Alright, fine,” Jonathan grumbles, because he knows Steve is right. “I think they’re the same Russians from last time. The ones from the mall.”

That makes Steve break out in chills, like a reflex he can’t control. Jonathan—and Nancy, and everyone who wasn’t Robin—knew of what happened under the mall to Steve and Robin, but they didn’t _know_ know. It hadn’t been fun to recount after doing so in explicit detail to the authorities, so he’d maybe skipped a few things. At the time, it hadn’t seemed like that big of a deal.

“Fantastic,” he mutters sarcastically.

Jonathan huffs his phantom laugh and—there, slumped against a wall next to some haphazard crates and a shelf full of plastic containers. There’s Jonathan. Steve pulls himself over to Jonathan’s side, and Jonathan gives him a lopsided grin.

“Hey,” he greets weakly, and that’s when Steve realizes he’s grinning like a maniac in return.

“Never thought I’d be this glad to see your face, Byers,” Steve teases, and Jonathan rolls his eyes. “Glad you’re in one piece, though.”

Jonathan’s face falls. Just a little. Steve’s heart falls with it.

“What?” he asks tentatively, and Jonathan gives him a look that Steve takes to mean he’s very wrong in his assumption.

"There's just, uh, one thing," Jonathan says hesitantly. "Might've hurt myself while trying to fight the guys who took me. Help me with it."

And then Jonathan shifts, and Steve immediately notices something _very_ _off _about Jonathan’s leg.

“Whoa, okay! That’s a knife!” His hands rush forward and hover over the handle, like it was any help at all to look and not touch. “A knife! In your leg!”

“Steve,” Jonathan grinds out. “Shut up and help me get it out.”

“Shutting up,” Steve declares, and then snaps his jaw shut.

He’s still totally freaking out, though.

Jonathan takes a deep breath, then squeezes his eyes shut, and fucking rips the sucker right out. Blood doesn’t spurt all over the place like it might have in a movie, but there’s definitely a good amount of it now seeping from the smaller-than-expected wound. Steve nearly faints on the spot from the shock of the action, and he definitely screams, just a little.

“FUCK!” is what he screams, and he’s tearing his shirt off to get to his under shirt, which he also tears off, and starts pressing the cleaner of the two onto Jonathan’s leg. “FUCK FUCK FUCK!”

Jonathan has nothing to say to this. It’s probably because he’s pale as a ghost with his head pressed back against the wall and his eyes closed, breathing so labored he puts basketball players to shame, the bloodied knife limp in his hand. Steve’s pretty sure he’s not passed out, not with how heavy he’s breathing. He’s too busy putting pressure on the wound to do anything about that, though.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, we have to get you out of here,” Steve hisses after he’s regained better control of himself. “This is so not sanitary, oh my god. Your mom is going to kill me.”

Jonathan huffs a laugh, and it might be the most beautiful thing Steve’s ever heard him do, because it means he’s definitely not passed out. “Really not the problem you should be focusing on right now,” he says weakly, his voice coarse and pained.

“If I focus on anything else, I’m going to freak the fuck out again.”

“Alright, okay.” The hand that held the knife, the one coated in blood, reaches up to wrap around one of Steve’s wrists, and Steve looks up to find Jonathan wincing down at him. “Harder,” he says breathlessly.

Steve blinks. Then, he swallows. “Come again?”

“More _pressure_, Steve.”

“Oh, right.” Steve nods, which does nothing for anything, of course. “On it.”

Steve applies more pressure, and Jonathan groans.

“Hop,” Jonathan gasps, grimacing. Steve doesn’t ease up on the pressure, but his eyes snap back to Jonathan’s face. “I saw Hopper. They—have him. He didn’t— He’s alive.”

Steve stops cold. “What?”

“He’s—”

“Yeah, I got that part,” Steve rushes, shaking his head. “He can’t be alive, Jonathan. You were seeing things. Or, something, I don’t know. Pain from getting stabbed. There’s no way—”

Jonathan whips his head to face Steve, and his eyes are burning with anger when Steve finds them. “No, I wasn’t. They have Hopper, damn— _dammit.”_

“That’s not possible.” Steve’s voice breaks on the last word, because it wasn’t. Hopper was gone. They’d said goodbye.

“I don’t know how either, I just know what I saw.”

“Then,” Steve starts, his mind racing a mile a minute, because if Hopper somehow survived, then— “Then we have to get him out of here with us.”

Jonathan flinches. “We don’t even know where we are. We can’t get out if we don’t know where to go.”

“Yeah, thanks, Capricornus, I got that much.”

Jonathan pauses, frowning at Steve. “C-Copernicus,” he corrects, and it takes all of Steve’s willpower not to throw the bloodied shirt in his face.

“Is now really the time for that?!” he accuses, maybe freaking out again just a smidge, and it gets him another ghost of a chuckle from Jonathan. “Well get there when we get there. Your damn leg comes first.” Steve nods at the other discarded shirt. “Rip that up, we’ll use it to—”

Steve stops abruptly when Jonathan’s hand—the not-bloodied one, thankfully—snaps out and covers Steve’s mouth, Jonathan’s head turning sharply to face the door. Steve dares a look, too, but nothing happens. He can’t hear anything, not at first, but then the locks start to click, and dread seeps into Steve’s very core.

The door opens, and that’s when shit really hits the fan.

Hard.


	9. shackled

The man who comes in doesn’t even look all that threatening. He’s in a jumpsuit of sorts, the kind a mechanic might wear on the job, only identifiable as suspicious because of the Russian flag patch on the upper sleeve, and he’s carrying a tray filled with white objects that Steve can’t identify before he jumps to his feet and starts yelling. It startles the man into dropping the tray, but he doesn’t run from the room. He only stands there, staring at Steve like _Steve’s_ the crazy one here and not him after kidnapping two, probably four, teenagers and sticking them in some sort of storage room together.

Steve makes the mistake of trying to fight him. He doesn’t know if it’s because the guy is probably a Russian in more than just uniform (because the guy never says a word) or because he won his last fight, _against _a Russian, but it must have gotten to his head, because he tackles the guard (if that’s even what he is) and promptly loses the battle when the guy takes him around the neck and smashes his head into the wall.

He’ll learn one of these days, really. Just not _this_ day.

He doesn’t get knocked out by that move, somehow, but he’s too dazed to fight when the man switches his hold and throws Steve to the ground, then presses a cloth soaked in something chemical-smelling to his face. The last thing he hears is Jonathan screaming his name.

The first thing he hears when he comes to again is shushing, and then someone—a girl—gently calling his name. He groans, trying to move into a more comfortable position, only to realize he can’t move his arms from behind his back, where they seemed to be stuck. His eyes snap open, and—well, there’s Robin.

Covered in dirt, with her red and yellow striped sweater torn at the shoulder and fraying at the hem, hair a mess—it’s Robin, and Steve almost starts crying just for the sake of it, despite having initially hoped she and Nancy had managed to get away.

“You gotta stop getting knocked around, Steve,” she tells him quietly. “You’re killing off brain cells you can’t spare.”

Steve chokes on a laugh, then nearly gasps when the motion of laughing makes his arms—which are painfully numb—sting with prickles of blood loss.

And that’s when he realizes they’re stuck behind him. That’s when he realizes he’s got someone shackled to his back, and it’s not Nancy, because he can just barely see that she’s tied to Robin’s.

It’s a painful sort of deja vu, and Steve wonders for a moment why the Russians liked tying people back-to-back so much. He didn’t think it was necessarily very productive.

“Shit,” he mumbles, wanting desperately to rub his face just because he can’t. “Are you okay? Is Nancy okay? Is Jonathan—”

“I’m okay,” Jonathan croaks before Steve can finish. “They bandaged up my leg. Hurts, but it’s clean now.”

Steve almost relaxes on reflex. Almost.

“Nancy?” he tries, because she hasn’t said a thing, and Robin’s eyes go wide.

“She’s … been out since they tied us up,” Robin explains slowly, then shifts her head to the side to show Nancy’s, bent forward to the point where Steve couldn’t see anything but hair. Anger sparks in his gut at the sight of it. “She attacked the person who came into our room and they knocked her out.”

“Sounds familiar,” Jonathan grumbles, like he wasn’t the one dating her in the first place.

Steve feels a strange swelling of pride, but it only lasts a moment before it falls back to worry. “She’s breathing though, right?”

“Oh, yeah,” Robin agrees, borderline deadpan, which told Steve she was actually enthusiastic. “I can feel her breathing real easily from where they put my hands.”

Jonathan tilts his head back until it touches against Steve’s, and Steve can _feel_ the confusion Robin’s statement spurred. Steve does nothing to rectify that for him.

“Great, then she’ll wake up eventually. In the meantime, we need to start figuring out where the hell we are.”

“Some storage space,” Jonathan mumbles.

Robin blinks in surprise. “Hold on, you’re telling me you two are such dinguses that you didn’t figure out where we are?” She laughs, and it’s as dry as the desert. “You’re kidding. Nancy and I figured it out within, like, the first five minutes.”

Jonathan bristles, but Steve just rolls his eyes. “They put the two smart people together, alright? Besides, Jonathan and I were a little too busy to bother with snooping around for clues at the time, anyway.”

That look—the look Robin had given him outside his car—returns to her eye. Just for a second. Steve still doesn’t know what it means, but he doesn’t care enough right now to ask.

“Just tell us where we are,” Jonathan pushes, and, yeah, he definitely sounds annoyed. Robin smirks, her head tilting like she found Jonathan’s irritation interesting.

“We’re at a 7-Eleven,” she says simply.

Steve jerks his head back. The action only makes him smack his head into Jonathan’s, who yelps and barks at Steve to be careful.

“How the hell do you know we’re at a _7-Eleven?”_ he asks her incredulously.

She holds his gaze, then slowly raises her eyes over to a point beyond Steve’s head. Unable to turn that way, Steve jostles his shoulder against Jonathan’s.

“What’s back there?” he asks.

Jonathan turns his head, first one way, then the next. “Uh. Boxes?” he tries. “A lot of boxes.”

Robin rolls her eyes. “Ugh. _Boys,”_ she offers helpfully. “They’re filled with syrup mix, genius. _Slurpee_ syrup mixes.”

Jonathan huffs. “So? Plenty of places have Slurpee machines.”

Robin cocks her head, eyes lighting up. “Oh, but only _Hawkins’ 7-Eleven _has cherry. You don’t find another until you hit Indianapolis, and there aren’t any at all in Illinois.” She smirks, slow and so fucking annoying. “They serve strawberry across the board.”

Steve hesitates, and he knows his incredulity shows on his face, because Robin looks far too happy about what she’s witnessing. “How the _hell_ do you know that, Robin?”

“I like Slurpees, and cherry is the best,” she says simply, looking entirely too smug.

Steve is really starting to hate that this is what his life has become.

“So, we’re in a fucking 7-Eleven storage room?” he tries, because it’s a grasp on something, and that’s about all he can really power through on right in this second.

“Probably an underground storage bunker, actually. I can’t hear any traffic when you guys bother to shut your pie-holes.”

Steve grinds his teeth together hard enough for them to squeak, because he’s getting real tired of this shit. “How many underground bunkers do they _need?”_

“Well, the last one they lost,” Robin reminds him, and he just looks at her. “What? It’s the truth. You can’t fault me for—” She stops abruptly, her head snapping to the side.

A quiet groaning fills the silence and, thank god, Nancy is coming to.

She comes to much faster than Steve does, and she comes to like she’s ready to fight.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa there!” Robin calls a little frantically when they both jolt, Nancy with a need to act out of her delirium and Robin because Nancy had likely brought Robin with her due to their current situation. “Easy! I'll lose my arms!”

“Robin?” Nancy tries, craning her neck. Steve sees the flash of one blue eye, and then, “Steve?! Oh my god! Where’s Jonathan?”

“Present,” says Jonathan.

Nancy slumps in relief, and Steve finds he can’t blame her, because he feels like doing the same now that everyone is accounted for and seems okay.

“Not to ruin the touchy lovey reunion or anything,” Robin starts, sounding anything but sorry about it. Steve thinks he could kiss her, because she never beat around the bush, and he loved that part about her. “But we’ve seriously got to figure out how the heck we’re getting out of here before the overall dude comes back.”

“I don’t know if you noticed, but we’re kind of stuck together, and, for my part, I can’t feel my arms,” Steve offers.

“I can feel mine,” Jonathan replies, and then Robin nods her head.

“Yeah, so can I,” Nancy adds as the final input.

“Great,” says Steve drily. “So it’s just me. Why does this information surprise me? It shouldn’t surprise me.”

“El,” Nancy says suddenly, while Steve is still in the midst of his inopportune mope session. “El will find us!”

Robin frowns. “How is a kid going to find us?”

“She has powers,” Steve tells her, and now he’s getting excited, his previous digression forgotten in a blink. El would know what to do. El had done things like this before. El—

—doesn’t have control of her powers anymore.

The realization must occur to Nancy at the same time it does Steve, because her head drops, and all Steve can see is the wild mess of her curls.

“We have to find another way out,” Jonathan whispers.

Robin only blinks, looking dazed. “I don’t understand what just happened, but I’m going to stick with my initial plan of biting the next guard’s ankle off and then going for the throat.”

Steve feels Jonathan stiffen, but Steve starts laughing, so hard that his shoulders are stinging with the pins and needles of his useless arms. “Ow,” he half-laughs, half-sobs, tilting his head back until it met Jonathan’s. “Ow, man. You’re killing me.”

“Better me than them.”

That sobers him up immediately, and he almost wishes Robin had just let him have his mirth for the time being. “No kidding,” he says somberly, and then sighs. Jonathan sighs in turn, and then Nancy follows. Robin just rolls her eyes.

“Well, okay, let’s start with the facts, right?” Nancy starts, sounding like she did when she used to help quiz Steve on a subject he wasn’t even remotely able to grasp. Which was most of them. “We’re in Hawkins—”

Jonathan cuts her off. “Are you positive about that?”

“The Slurpee mix—”

“Maybe we’re in a far away state that also has cherry.”

“Nope,” Robin chimes in. “We weren’t out long enough for much ground to have been covered.”

“Oh,” says Jonathan, quietly, and then he doesn’t say a word.

“As I was saying,” Nancy starts again, and then gets no further.

Because just then the door bursts open, and Jim Hopper is standing in the light of the opening.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a note: if I ever miss a day's upload, expect two chapters the following day.


	10. unconscious

He looks like a beautiful, grimy angel, standing in the black-lit rectangle of the doorway. Steve thinks maybe he should start praying, right then and there.

And then he opens his mouth, and the illusion is shattered like the glass pane of a picture frame.

“UP!” Hopper hollers, charging into the room, and that’s when Steve realizes he’s got someone thrown over his shoulder.

_“Hopper?”_ Nancy says faintly, and the man in question stops short in the room, looking first to the cluster that was Nancy and Robin, and then the one that was Jonathan and Steve.

“Aw, shit,” he proclaims elegantly, his eyes rolling to the ceiling. “You’re _all_ here? I thought it was just Joyce’s kid!” He drops the man he was carrying like a sack of potatoes and whips out a knife from God knows where (and Steve really doesn’t _want_ to know where, on that note) and wrenches Steve and Jonathan apart at the neck, sawing through whatever held their arms together like a man on a mission. Steve yelps when his arms throb with shockwaves of pain from the need for blood circulation, but that doesn’t stop Hopper even slightly, and, eventually, they’re free, and he moves onto Nancy and Robin.

“We’re in a 7-Ele—” Nancy starts.

“I _know,”_ Hopper cuts her off in that “I don’t have time for this shit” way Steve hadn’t realized he’d missed so much. “That guy back there filled me in.”

Steve looks to the guy in question as he rubs the feeling back into his stinging arms, crumpled on the dirty carpet floor like a discarded ragdoll, and grimaces. “Is that how we’re treating the people who help us now?”

Hopper doesn’t grace that with a response. Instead, he helps Nancy and Robin up, who are now free from their bonds, and Steve, arms still smarting, gets helped up by Jonathan, whose leg seems to be at a disadvantage.

That put two of them in the “debilitating leg injury” category, then, and Steve was not too fond of the odds that likely came with that. Robin helps Jonathan stay steady, and Nancy helps Steve to his feet. His ankle still hurts, but it hurts less than it did a few days ago, and he knows he can stand on it at least for a little while.

Unfortunately, Hopper shatters any hope for Steve’s ankle with no effort at all.

“We’re in Hawkins.” He turns and hefts the guy back up. The guy doesn’t move even slightly. Steve really hopes that doesn’t mean he’s dead. “We need to get out.”

That stops all of them in confusion, and Hopper is out the doorway before he notices them hesitating. “What are you doing?” he barks. “Move, move, move!”

They jump into motion. Robin moves between Steve and Jonathan, helping them both walk along, while Nancy helps maneuver them around to fit through the doorway.

“You’re lucky I got a lot of exercise lugging drums around in band,” Robin grumbles, hefting Jonathan’s arm higher, and Jonathan only mumbles something in response.

“Less talking, more moving!” Hopper urges sharply as he leads them down a short hallway that ends in a staircase leading up to a steel door. “We’re stealing the first car we see. Keep your eyes peeled.”

“You were right,” Robin confides in Steve quietly once they reach the top of the stairs and switch around, and Steve frowns down at her. “Nancy’s not stuck up at all. She’s a badass.”

A smile springs to Steve’s face. “Yeah,” he agrees. “She totally is.”

* * *

They don’t see a single car, because, surprise, the 7-Eleven has apparently been closed temporarily for “repairs.” So they walk.

With Jonathan held up by Nancy and Steve, who’s okay with supporting him as long as it’s on his right side, and Robin on standby for when Steve starts to lag.

And, when Steve asks how long they’re going to be walking, Hopper very firmly declares, “Until we find something _better.”_

Great. It’s all just—_great._

“I can’t believe we got kidnapped and walked away with a guy who was supposed to be dead and an unconscious Russian.”

“He’s one of the good guys,” Hopper says gruffly, for the first time explaining at least a little about the whole predicament.

“He’s a _Russian!”_ Steve protests, and Jonathan winces.

“Yes, Steve, _thank you, _I noticed that part.” Hopper hefts the guy higher, then squints up at the sky. “Nightfall’s in about two hours. Get hoofin’ it if you don’t want to be sleeping on the ground tonight.”

“Hoofin’ it where, exactly?” Robin pipes up. “That 7-Eleven was the only thing on the road for a few miles into town.” She pauses and looks back. “And we’re walking in the wrong direction.”

“We’re not staying in Hawkins,” Hopper explains shortly.

“What?”

“Not safe, not when it’s been ransacked by a handful of kids and an old fat guy.”

They steal glances at each other, and Jonathan ends up having the courage to ask, “Then where are we going?”

“You’ll see. We’ve been there before.” When they all just give him dubious looks, he shrugs one shoulder. “Well, two of you have. Now, eyes on the way ahead. If you see anything suspicious, tell me. Steve, keep Jonathan moving.”

“Already on it, asshole,” Steve grumbles, and Jonathan huffs a laugh at him in return.

Hopper graciously ignores that. “There’s going to be a working gas station not too far along here. We’ll try our luck there.”

He gets a round of grumbling from the rest of the group as his response.

Then Robin, being Robin, pipes up, “So, you gonna tell us why you’re suddenly alive, here, and apparently overtaking a random Russian plot to kidnap four random ass teenagers?”

“Not random,” Hopper starts with. “Also, I was never dead. They nabbed me right before Joyce pulled the keys. Kept me in some room for a few months, testing shit on me and asking me questions, then brought me here. Apparently under the assumption I’d help them in return for keeping you guys safe from the Demogoblin thing they summoned up from their own special pit to the Upside Down. Once they got here, though, they lost track with the base back home. I managed to get you during a scramble. Lucky timing.”

Everyone is silent. Steve’s not sure about the others, but he’s just trying to figure out if everything Hopper just said actually came out of his mouth or if he’d started viciously hallucinating.

Nancy is apparently the first to process everything, because she’s the first to speak. “I’m not … sure I understand,” she says slowly. “Why would they kidnap us?”

“They think one of you is Will,” Hopper explains. Then, corrects himself, “Well, one of you boys. I think they took you girls as collateral because you showed up with Harrington over there.”

Jonathan and Steve look at each other. “But Will is fourteen,” Jonathan says slowly.

Hopper shrugs. “They probably don’t know that part. Like I said, they’re not exactly following what’s happening back at base. They just knew they were looking for a white male with brown hair and brown eyes, young enough not to grow much facial hair, connected to the girl from the labs.” He pauses at the mention of El, and then goes silent.

Steve winces, and Jonathan starts to cough. Neither of them had thought to not shave that morning, obviously. They weren’t big on the facial scruff look. And El? They all hung out with El, and it was pure luck they hadn’t gotten Will instead of Jonathan and Steve.

“You … said something about a monster?” Nancy tries next, hesitant, and Steve can tell she’s using her calculating tone of voice.

“Yup. Brought their own Demogoblin they’d been messing with—”

“Demogorgan,” they all corrected simultaneously.

“Jesus, whatever it is. Brought it, lost it, pretty sure it’s dead.”

Steve looks at Nancy, who looks at Jonathan. Then, they all three look at Robin.

Hopper, obviously noticing the silence, looks back at them suspiciously. “What?”

“It’s injured, but not dead,” Jonathan says.

“It attacked Nancy, Jonathan, and me,” Steve says next.

“I chased it down, but it got away from me,” Nancy rounds off. “It’s probably still out in the woods somewhere.”

“Injured?” Hopper repeats. “Injured how?”

“Nancy shot its face off,” Steve replies in what he thinks is a helpful way, but Nancy shakes her head like Steve’s being Steve again.

“I got a few rounds into it, but it was hurt before it even found us. Something weird going on with its leg.” She frowns, her brow wrinkling up. “Like it was diseased or something.”

Hopper hums in thought. “Okay, weird. I’ll have to look into that. For now,” he starts, and then turns to them. When Steve looks up to face him, he realizes he can see the glow of colored metal in the sun just beyond the last line of trees.

Cars.

“Time to endorse some grand theft auto, kids.”

* * *

Hopper is shockingly good at stealing a car for someone who was once the head of the Hawkins police office and was expected to have better morals. He grabs a car big enough to be a multiple-seater from an unsuspecting side parking lot—whoever had parked it had left it running while they ran into the mart—and drives it out of the gas station and around until he could wedge it into the woods.

They ease the unconscious man into the very back, laying him out on the two-seater that was technically also the trunk, while Robin, Steve, and Jonathan take the middle seats. Nancy slides into the front seat next to Hopper before anyone’s picked their seat, her eyes blazing and focused on Hopper.

“I’ll save it until we get where we’re getting,” she warns the moment Hopper’s in his seat, “but at least tell us where we’re going.”

Hopper sighs heavily, and Steve can feel that in his soul. “We’re going to Murray’s hideout.”

Nancy blinks in surprise. “You’re taking us to Murray’s place? I don’t know if that’s a good idea. He wouldn’t want us there after everything that’s happened, even if you are his friend.”

“I compromised him,” Hopper explains simply, throwing the car into drive and revving the engine. “I can guarantee you he’s not there anymore.”


	11. stitches

When they get to what apparently is Murray’s old place, Steve can’t help but remark about how decrepit it looks as he leans his head to look out the window.

“Like I said,” Hopper says as he parks the car haphazardly in the open space beyond the gate, which was not only open, but looked as if it had been busted through rather than opened how it normally should be, “I compromised him. He’s long gone. In fact,” he continues, opening his door, “I’m surprised he didn’t burn the whole thing down.”

They set about getting everyone out of the car, which is more tussle than Steve, who’s exhausted after everything that’s happened, is really equipped to handle right in that second, and he all but collapses on the floor when they prop him up against a wall with Jonathan by his side.

“We need to stitch Jonathan and Steve up. I’ll get looking for a first-aid kit,” Nancy announces, already wandering off.

“I’ll help!” Robin offers, throwing Steve a wink before bounding off after Nancy. Jonathan, being right next to Steve, catches the wink, and frowns inquisitively at Steve.

“Are you sure you’re not dating?” Jonathan asks, and Steve only sighs. It’s not the first time he’s asked the question, but it had definitely been a long time since he last did, and Steve thought he had shot that idea firmly in the foot the last time.

“Very sure,” Steve repeats in exasperation. “We’re good friends. She’s like a weird little sister, okay? Besides,” Steve continues, shifting around against the wall, making his arm brush against Jonathan and Jonathan to nearly flinch in response, “... I’m not her type,” Steve finishes, only after squinting at Jonathan in confusion.

“How are you not her type?” Jonathan asks after flushing and slumping down further. “I thought you were everyone’s type.”

“So did I,” agrees Steve with just a touch of dramatics. “Alas, there are a few my good looks just can’t sway.”

Jonathan apparently doesn’t have a reply for that, because he goes silent, his head still ducked down to the point where Steve can’t see anything but the curve of his nose beyond his hair. Steve takes in the room as the conversation drops.

It’s obviously been abandoned based on the dust coating everything the eye can see, with a table upturned towards a couch and discarded pieces of things Steve can’t identify littering the ground among a myriad of loose papers. A few of the TVs that line the walls are busted, but most of them look like they wouldn’t work in the first place.

Hopper’s in the corner, holding a black phone to his ear and frowning like he can’t understand what’s being said. Steve’s surprised the thing even works, because it looks like no one has been here in months, and he highly doubts the phone bill has been paid in this Murray guy’s absence. The electricity bill wasn’t—they’re operating on the light of every flashlight and battery-powered lamp they could find, which thankfully was a lot more than Steve thinks a normal person would own.

“Found it!” Robin calls after a few minutes where Steve has mercifully managed to zone out, and bustles over with one hell of a first-aid kit in her arms. She drops to the floor with it and sets it between Steve and Jonathan. Nancy comes rushing back, but stops short when she reaches a door not too far from where the other three of them sat.

“What?” Steve asks her while Robin breaks into the box. Jonathan, who had been watching Robin first, looks up curiously.

Nancy snaps her head back, and that’s a blush if Steve’s ever seen one. “Nothing!” she says hurriedly, in that way that told Steve she was completely, utterly lying. “I’ve just remembered something. Nothing important.”

Steve frowns at Robin, who frowns back, and then turns to share the look with Jonathan, only to realize his face has gone the palest Steve thinks he’s ever seen. His eyes are locked on either Nancy or the door, but the implication was there regardless of which it really was.

And, Steve might not be the sharpest light bulb in the linen closet, but he can put two and two together.

“Oh,” he says despite himself as it clicks, that something had happened between Nancy and Jonathan there, here, and the sound is small and almost non-verbal at all.

Jonathan’s head whips to Steve, and he looks horrified. “Steve, wait, I—” he starts, but Steve shakes his head.

“Nah, man. It’s cool. It’s all over and done with, right?” Steve shrugs, and Jonathan switches from horrified, to confused, to almost—sad?

_Yeah_, Steve realizes, _he looks like his heart is breaking._

Steve leans away warily. “Don’t look at me like that, I said it was cool. Why do you look like I just decided I never wanted to talk to you or Nancy ever again? Which, I could never do if I even tried, and you know that.”

Jonathan only ducks his head and shakes it, lips pressed together hard enough that they almost disappeared from his face. Steve switches his confused gaze to Robin, but she’s looking at Jonathan curiously and doesn’t notice.

“We should—get to stitching you guys back up,” says Nancy hastily. Robin sits up to attention and holds the needle and thread out.

“After you,” she tells Nancy, who blanches.

“Me?”

“I passed Home Ec. by the skin of my teeth,” Robin informs them almost proudly. “You don’t want me doing anything resembling needlework if you want it done halfway decently.”

Nancy quickly takes the needle and thread, then gets to work sanitizing and threading it while Robin cleans Steve’s ankle, because he made the mistake of volunteering to go first.

He might have only popped a couple of his stitches, but he suddenly lost his gall in the face of the actual repair.

“So, uh,” he tries, if only to distract himself, “what did you mess up in Home Ec.?”

Robin looks up at him in amusement. “Made a shirt without a neck hole.”

Jonathan chokes on a startled laugh. Robin grins at him.

“Don’t they give you a pre-cut pattern to follow?” Nancy asks as she ties off the thread.

“Sure did. I cut the neck hole, then accidentally sewed it shut during the actual sewing process.”

Steve coughs. “Yup, that settles it for me. Nancy does the sewing, Robin stays in the corner and doesn’t interact.”

Robin swats him, but she’s smiling. “Shut up, Steve. I’m excellent moral support.”

“Sure,” Steve agrees, no longer paying attention to the conversation and Nancy moves in. He closes his eyes as soon as the needle pierces through his skin, and has his attention directed as something—_someone_—clamps down on his hand. And then, another hand on his second, this time bigger, rougher. He knows Robin’s hand, knew Robin would remember his newfound dislike of anything remotely resembling a syringe, but the other hand—

He blinks open his eyes and, sure enough, Jonathan is holding it in his fist, his eyes searching Steve’s face. He doesn’t say anything, but the intense look in his eyes tells Steve he knows something is up.

“Are you ever going to tell us what really happened to you?” Nancy asks nonchalantly, breaking Steve from Jonathan’s gaze, and Steve realizes she’d finished when he wasn’t looking. She looks up, and that’s when Steve can see the worry in her big blue eyes.

Steve looks over at Robin, and, after a moment, Robin only shrugs.

“Maybe,” Steve relents, and Nancy gets ready to take on Jonathan’s leg. “Maybe someday.”

* * *

Nancy’s in the middle of washing her hands in the sink, Steve’s helping Jonathan bandage up his newly-finished stitches, and Robin’s helping Hopper listen to something he found on the phone’s auto-message system in order to look for any suspicious wording when it happens.

It’s dark out at this point, had been getting dark when they first arrived, and, though the door had been firmly re-locked once everyone was inside, it had only been two locks, all the others had been broken. That hadn’t seemed all that worrying at first when they’d entered the premises, too focused on stitching up Jonathan and Steve while Hopper looked for signs to locate Murray again, but it flashes to the forefront of Steve’s mind when a loud crashing noise echoes suddenly through the too-quiet bunker of a house.

Hopper’s and Robin’s heads snap up, towards the ceiling, while Jonathan and Steve look to the door, then at each other. A sound like bending metal comes next, and that spurs Hopper into motion. He lunges for the table and whips the sucker up to prop against the door, shifting his clothes around and allowing Steve a glimpse that he’ll later realize is disturbing in a way he can’t think of in the face of what’s happening now.

“What is it?” Nancy asks from Jonathan’s other side, causing Steve to startle hard enough that he smacks his head against the wall. He hadn't heard nor seen her approach, and his nerves were on fire.

“Jesus, ow,” he mutters to himself as Jonathan shakes his head. His leg is burning, and, for a split second, he thinks it might be for more reasons than just the new stitches.

And then, the lights flicker, and then go out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me at the start of this: I’ll just write whatever one-shot idea that comes to mind for each prompt, and if a little plot happens along the way, cool!  
Me now: one-shot? I don’t know her.


	12. "don't move"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one is so short! I'm not actually home today :'D
> 
> (also this one may get a little tweaked later since it IS so short, so maybe keep an eye on it)

The room goes utterly still.

Steve can’t see shit with the lights out, but he can hear the rasping panic of Jonathan’s breathing just to his left. He can’t hear Nancy, but he learned early on that she was way better at handling fear than either he or Jonathan was, so just because he can’t hear her doesn’t mean she’s moved from beside Jonathan.

More banging sounds from outside the door, the sound of metal bending and groaning with something being forced against it. The garage? Steve remembers a garage door, but—was it connected to the house?

“Hey,” Hopper somehow manages to quietly shout, making Steve jump about a foot and—yeah, Nancy was still there, that’s definitely her hand on his arm, and, er, Jonathan’s hand on his—oh, nope, there it goes, it’s gone. Jonathan swallows loud enough to resonate in Steve’s eardrums, and Steve can sense the way Jonathan’s face goes red even though he can’t see it. It was a bone-deep kind of feeling. More instinct than anything.

He’ll grant Jonathan reprieve on that one. It was damn dark, after all.

“Don’t. Move. A muscle,” Hopper warns, slowly, his voice carrying leagues of calm peril in its tone.

Steve thinks it’s safe to say that’s the exact moment everyone realizes what exactly is lurking beyond the door, because the stillness turns deadly, right before the door bursts inwards with a thundering crack. The lights flicker to life, just for a brief second, long enough to confirm the presence of the last thing any of them wanted to see.

The monster roars, and Steve starts counting his minutes.

He doesn’t remember moving, but he must have done it somewhere between the lights coming to life for a brief heartbeat and the monster living up to its nightmare fuel of a reputation, because he’s got his arms braced on either side of Nancy and Jonathan’s heads where they’ve curled together for protection, his one leg pushed behind him for leverage and the other pinning Nancy’s legs underneath of him.

It’s a wide berth, two people just about under him, but Steve’s too consumed with figuring out how to keep the monster away from them to really consider it.

His heart pounds in his ears as the seconds tick by, almost too loud for him to hear the Demogorgan making its slow, sluggish way into the room. A hand he suddenly realizes is fisted in his shirt tugs once, twice, more urgently than the last, telling Steve the monster was coming their way immediately.

Of course. His luck wouldn’t allow anything less.

_“Don’t move,”_ Steve barely breathes, pushing farther into Jonathan and Nancy in an attempt to cover as much ground as possible.

Arms come up to wrap around his torso, one from Nancy and one from Jonathan, pressing him closer—into—the small space between them, their grip too strong for him to pull away without considerable force.

He’s pretty sure he stops breathing. He’s pretty sure they all do, because he can’t hear Jonathan any more. He knows the monster is close, so close, but he doesn’t know what to do. It was luck that brought him this far, and nothing he’d done to actually prepare for another Upside Down attack could be used in a situation like this.

_Figures,_ some detached, cynical part of Steve muses, just as the monster gets so close Steve can hear the disgusting sound its mouth petals make. It’s close—how close, he can’t see—but so fucking close. Someone is trembling, but he can’t tell if it’s him or not.

Steve. Doesn’t. Breathe.

The lights come back to life, and _there_ is the monster, splayed in the air right above Steve, Jonathan, and Nancy, seconds from attack. Steve has only just a split moment to look over his shoulder and start screaming right along with the others when it suddenly _explodes._

Its head is blown clear off, splattering Steve, Nancy, and Jonathan with gore and black, syrupy ichor. The body shudders, and then falls to the floor with a thud. Behind what’s left of it is the Russian man, holding a smoking gun and breathing like a warrior won.

“HELL YEAH, SMIRNOFF!” Hopper roars, and they all slump against the wall in relief.

* * *

Cleanup is disgusting.

Robin does them all a favor and starts wetting all the towels she can find, along with some discarded curtains, and brings them to the traumatized three while they work on getting over what just happened in favor of getting ready for the next bullshit to spring to life. Steve makes an idle, dry remark about burning his clothes as he fails to rid them of the black goop the Demogorgan basically decreted, and Robin decides that’s probably the best idea he’s had all year. He ignores her, but ends up wearing this Murray guy’s old reject clothes all the same, along with Nancy and Jonathan.

Hopper nixes the idea of not going back to Hawkins, though, so he hopes the wife-beater moment won’t be long-lived. He looks ridiculous.

Smirnoff sits on the couch, looking over at the corpse of the Demogorgan and muttering in Russian, a scrap of paper in his hand and a pen making sudden, rushed marks as he goes back and forth between looking at the creature and looking down at his notes.

Hopper, who had left to get things ready for them to leave in the morning, returns to the scene once the car is deemed intact and a makeshift door has been crammed where the old one once resided. He goes to loom over the creature, pondering god knows what while Steve and Jonathan finish changing right in the open room. Nancy emerges from the bathroom, swimming in her change of clothes, and frowns at Hopper when she notices him.

“Hopper?” she calls, and Steve realizes maybe he should have been paying more attention, because suddenly Hopper doesn’t look so good.

When Hopper looks up, he looks scared shitless.

“What?” Nancy urges tentatively. “Is it not dead?”

“Oh, it’s dead,” Hopper confirms. Before they can relax, he adds, “But it’s not the one they lost.”


	13. adrenaline

It’s a long night that night.

Smirnoff and Hopper stay out on the couch and the floor, respectfully, just as a measure against the potential, if unlikely, attack from the monster none of them have seen since it left the apparent hands of its former caretakers. The dead Demogorgan is dragged to the beat up remains of the garage, placed next to a dead generator that Steve realizes must have been how Murray _actually _powered his house instead of using an electric company, and left there. No one bothers with the mess left behind beyond what they’ve already done, because it proves to be as tacky as tar when drying, and no one had the energy to deal with that, at least until morning.

Hopper tries to keep to some measure of what he probably considered decency by forcing the boys into one room and the girls into another, and that’s how Steve finds himself lying prostrate on a pull-out couch with Jonathan sitting next to him, holding his head.

“We should be going right back into town to warn the others,” he says into his hands. “We should at least be calling my mom. She’s freaking out right now, I know it.” He drops his hands into his lap and curls them into tight fists. “Shit, they’re all probably freaking out. This isn't fair.”

Steve reaches out and whaps two of his fingers against the base of Jonathan’s spine, making him jump. “And you don’t think Hopper calling her up to tell her we’re all alive wouldn’t make it worse?” he points out, and Jonathan first blinks in surprise, then purses his lips in annoyance.

“Can you go back to being the low-IQ jerk you were when we weren’t friends, please?” he remarks, making Steve laugh. “I don’t like that you’re suddenly pulling good points out of nowhere.”

“Hey,” Steve protests, still laughing, “I can pull good shit out of my ass sometimes. You just didn’t know me well enough to see it before now.”

Jonathan shoots him a dubious look. “You didn’t exactly offer up any good chances to build up a camaraderie with someone like me. Especially not right before our turning point.”

Steve wilts, and is surprised when Jonathan’s eyes pull together in worry. Steve whaps him again, just to get the look to go away.

“Yeah, alright, that’s fair to say. I was such a douchebag to you during that whole period.”

Jonathan snorts, turning so he doesn’t have to look over his shoulder at Steve. “You were always a douchebag.”

Steve winces despite himself. “Yeah, but I was, like, _super_ douche for a while there.”

“You were, yeah.” Jonathan shrugs. “But I did do a really creepy thing. I don’t know what I was thinking. I _knew_ better than to act like that, Mom would have had a fit if she found out.”

Steve just shakes his head. “Your brother was missing, man. Maybe you weren’t thinking anything.”

“I was thinking something,” Jonathan relents bitterly. “Something really stupid, whatever it was.”

He groans, dropping his face back into his hands, and Steve watches him and thinks about how far they’ve come. How much they’ve changed in the short amount of time that felt like decades with all that happened.

Like he’s read Steve’s mind, Jonathan mutters, “It feels like it was forever ago. But it was only a couple of years.”

“I can’t wrap my mind around that,” Steve admits. “Shit, I can’t wrap my mind around how we just went back to our lives each time.” He barks a short, bitter laugh, the reality of it smacking him in the face. “What the _fuck_ is wrong with us?”

“Didn’t really have a choice, did we?” Jonathan points out, and Steve huffs in response instead of offering something that required brain power. Jonathan pauses, then looks at Steve again. His dark eyes are hooded, his brow furrowed and his gaze tentative. “We didn’t really this time, though, did we?”

Steve doesn’t answer. He just watches Jonathan.

“We left,” Jonathan continues, sounding frustrated. “We didn’t move on. _You_ moved on, but my family fled.”

Steve thinks about his nightmares, his bad days with Robin. He thinks about the mania the town’s dissolved into since the Mind Flayer’s attack, how they’re so involved with blaming it on Satanism that they won’t see what’s right in front of their faces. He thinks about what he has to live with. He thinks about what they all had to live with, how they called each other and pushed on with what they could. How they still didn’t have a choice, even when everything was supposedly exposed.

He remembers that day Nancy showed up at his door—he never did learn why she had, just that she’d needed someone and he’d been home.

He knows what the last few years has done to him—has done to all of them—and he knows the truth of it all.

“No,” Steve says quietly. “We didn’t.”

Jonathan looks at him. His eyes are wide, open and dark as ever, and he turns on the bed until he’s nearly looming over Steve, confusion set deep into the furrowed lines of his brow, and Steve suddenly feels something he can’t explain.

He knows wants to grab Jonathan and protect him. He wants to do that with a lot of people, especially the ones who could probably protect him better. But he wants to do more with Jonathan right then, and it feels something like what he once felt for—and maybe _still _felt for—Nancy. And maybe felt for Robin, before he realized it was futile.

It’s there, an urge pulling from somewhere deep. An urge he doesn’t act on.

Steve’s mouth goes utterly dry.

Jonathan watches him, then pulls back and frowns.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and Steve gets snapped back to reality. “For what I did.”

“What?” Steve croaks, heaving already moved on from that. “That’s long gone, man. We already did that thing. Hell, I was the one who really had to do the apologizing. I fucked your camera up just to be a dick.”

Jonathan chuckles, his fist pressing against his mouth. He doesn’t linger on the motion, though, and sobers up quickly. “I wasn’t just apologizing for that.”

Steve blinks at Jonathan, and then it clicks. “Oh,” he says when he realizes. “Oh, yeah, uh.”

Steve stops. He doesn’t know what to say. Jonathan shouldn’t be apologizing for Nancy, because Nancy was her own person, and Steve couldn’t have done a thing during that time without sacrificing who he really was in the process. And Nancy didn’t deserve a fraud, no more than Steve deserved to lie to himself about who he was and how he wanted to deal with his pain.

“Don’t—” Steve starts, then stops again. He pushes out a hard sigh. “She needed you. She needed me, but I couldn’t step up to the plate. You can’t apologize to me for something that just—doesn’t fucking _matter_ anymore.”

Jonathan watches Steve, startled. Steve watches back, then rolls his head against the pillow in a shrug of a motion, and Jonathan relaxes like his strings have been cut. Tension Steve hadn’t felt until it was already gone dissipates from the room.

“We should sleep,” Steve says before Jonathan can say anything. “We probably have a lot of explaining to do when we get—”

The door opens suddenly, startling Steve to a stop. Jonathan jumps up, his stance ready for a fight despite no alarm being raised, but it’s just Nancy and Robin, bundled up in blankets stolen from the room they’d been assigned to, looking just as wired and emotionally untethered as Steve and Jonathan were. Steve feels something bloom in his chest at the sight of Robin standing in the frame of the doorway, and then something more at the sight of Nancy, looking between Jonathan and Nancy with a curious, almost-knowing frown.

“We couldn’t sleep,” Robin offers. “Figured you couldn’t, either.”

“Adrenaline does that to a person,” Jonathan offers, slumping back down onto the pull-out. Nancy eyes it for a moment, her lips pressing thin, and Steve remembers suddenly that this had been the room she’d stopped at. It felt like it happened forever ago.

Steve tries his best to push that away, because he didn’t know the details of what happened, and he’s pretty sure he really didn’t want to know. He was over the whole Jonathan and Nancy thing, it was fine, he didn’t need to be pulled back into that.

He wasn’t alone anymore. He didn’t need to dwell on the things he couldn’t change.

“Can we join you?” Nancy asks, but it barely sounds like a question, and Robin is already striding her way into the room with her hand wrapped around Nancy’s wrist, pulling them both onto the bed of the pull-out and directly into Steve’s general space.

“Whoa, okay!” he grunts when Robin just about flattens him. “There’s barely room here for two people, there’s no way four are going to fit.”

“We’ll manage,” is Robin’s reply, right before she starts to get comfortable.

Nancy still hovers, sitting at the foot of the bed, looking at Jonathan with her eyebrows raised in a silent question Steve no longer has the vocabulary to translate. Jonathan nods once, a jerk of a motion, and Nancy sighs. When she catches Steve staring at her, she cocks her head to the side as if daring him to call her our on the moment. Steve only smiles a grimace of a smile back, because he knows she knows he would never. She crawls up to his side, curling up against him in a contrast to the way Robin has wound her way into his space. He feels the mattress shift beneath all the weight when Jonathan moves to lie down with them.

“Is this okay?” she whispers to him, her mouth somewhere near his shoulder, so close he can feel her words, and that’s the exact moment he realizes he’s fucked.

“Yeah,” he replies, his voice tighter than he would like. He tries to swallow it all away, but that only proves a mistake, because it’s more of a gulp than anything, and Jonathan gives him a look when it’s clear everyone heard it.

Steve looks away as Jonathan takes up what space is left, his feet coming up against Steve’s ankles as he molds himself against Nancy’s figure and makes use of the free area below her for his longer legs, and the touch of his warm socks against the exposed skin of Steve’s ankle sparks a nearly-nauseating feeling of guilt. It surprises him only for a second, the intensity of the feeling, because he thinks a beat later he should actually feel worse.

Because he’s still in love with Nancy, and he’s pretty sure he’s the last one to realize it.


	14. tear-stained

In the morning, they dine on dry, stale cereal that Smirnoff seems a little too thrilled crunching on to be normal, and then they pile quietly into the car and start their drive back into Hawkins, the tension that kept them mute nearly palpable as they all come to the realization that shit was seriously about to go down, if Joyce had any say in it.

At first, Steve thinks it was a wonder how Will and Jonathan missed out on the fiery temper Joyce could pull out when no one was listening to her and she had things she needed to say, but then Steve remembers the way Jonathan had forcibly yanked Steve and Nancy to safety the first time they’d faced down a monster together, and he realizes maybe the apple doesn’t fall so far from the tree after all.

They go to Cerebro to contact the party on their radios, telling them to meet them at the old Byers house and not staying to listen to the answers then give when they finally pick up in fear of what kind of hell they might get from Joyce should she be around, and their avoidance of her would turn out to be their biggest failure, because she would show up with the all of the kids, looking like she wanted to smite them where they stand with only her eyes.

The kids are a tumbling mass of humans as they pour out from the small car, crammed in together by means Steve can’t fathom with his lack of background in physics, and they surge forward as one bumbling, chattering, somewhat-screeching mass, not a one keeping their cool as Mike runs into Nancy’s arms and Will catapults himself at Jonathan with Joyce close behind. Erica, who had apparently tagged along with Lucas after being the one to answer his radio, goes right for Robin, and she looks the least worried out of all of the children, her expression more one of triumph than anything.

Dustin appears out of the mob and bodily slams into Steve, sending him flying into the lawn with a grunt of pain when his ankle protests at the sudden action. He presses his wet face into Steve’s shirt, babbling something at such a fast speed that Steve can’t make out a word of it, then grunts to a stop when another body adds to the pile on top of him, followed again by another. Steve can’t tell which ones from the way the sun is blinding him, but god they’re heavy.

“I would like to be able to breathe!” Steve begs a little frantically when none of them make a move to let him up. All he gets in return is a round of wet-sounding laughter that’s almost half-sobbing, and he realizes maybe he doesn’t care so much that his lungs are being crushed alive as long as the kids are getting what they want.

Shit, he really missed them.

Hopper and Smirnoff stay just out of sight, Hopper with a hand on Smirnoff’s shoulder just in case the language barrier muddled things, but Smirnoff doesn’t look inclined to interfere. He only stands there, his hand fisted over a point on his torso, watching Joyce with a sad look. No one notices them in the frenzy to greet the missing four and check on their well-being, so they don’t make a move to ruin the whole event by throwing everything into confusion at the sudden appearance of one previously-assumed dead guy and his “evil but not really” Russian friend.

That is, until Joyce starts yelling.

“I thought you were _dead_,” she reprimands all four of them in one go once Steve’s been helped back to his feet and his borrowed shirt is thoroughly tear-stained thanks to the combined efforts of Dustin, Lucas, and Max, her face switching from relieved to furious with seemingly no effort at all. Steve’s seen Joyce mad before, but he doesn’t think he’s ever seen her _this_ mad, not even when the kids when out looking for the Demogorgan.

It was one thing to aid her in her lecture against them. It was another thing entirely to be the one under her fire.

“I called the police!” she continues, emphasizing the _police_ part, because it had been a mutual agreement before that they were not going to involve the Hawkins police department again after Hopper was no longer a part of the force. Robin stiffens and, oh yeah, her parents were probably shitting themselves, because they’d been kidnapped on a Monday, and she definitely missed some school. Steve’s pretty sure his parents weren’t home just yet, but they likely got contacted by the police if they were involved. With his past digressions thanks to the bullshit they’ve gone through, though, he wasn’t so sure they’d be all that surprised. His dad would have some words for him, that’s for sure, but Steve thinks that’s about all there will be before they jet off somewhere else.

“Do you know what they told me when I reported you three missing?” Joyce questions them, but now it sounds like she’s directing her anger, and she pretty much confirms that when she continues with, “They suggested you ran off together! Didn’t even bother with an investigation! Do you know what that did to your parents?”

Nancy winces. “Is Mom—”

“I told her you would be back,” Mike chimes in, almost meekly, his eyes watching Joyce warily. “She tried to interrogate me on where you went, but I kept mum. Told her you had a mission to work on with the others. I knew you’d come back, though.”

Nancy smiles at her little brother, and Mike, obviously despite himself, perks up with pleasure at doing something good for the team.

Joyce is not so happy with it. “Which did nothing to help with the police, Mike,” she tells him sternly. She stops, then shakes her head furiously, sending her already frazzled hair flying. “You’re deviating from the point. You didn’t even call me when you had the chance, Jonathan?” she accuses, whipping to face her son, who ducks his head in a flinch. “You _know_ what’s happened in this family, and you just_ don’t call me?”_

“That would be my fault, Joyce,” Hopper says, stepping into the scene with Smirnoff in tow, and, for the first time, Steve thinks Joyce is going to faint from how pale she suddenly goes.

She stares at the two of them, her mouth working. When nothing comes out, she squeezes her eyes shut, opens them again, and shakes her head when whatever she wanted to happen doesn’t happen.

“Alexei?” she questions, nearly more to herself than to the people in front of her, and the relief that the fire is off of him does wonders for Steve’s heart rate. Her hand reaches out, like she was going to touch one of them, and then she pulls it back and shakes her head slowly.

“No, no, no, he was dead,” Joyce babbles, pointing at the Russian man. She switches the finger to Hopper, “_You_ we’re dead!”

“People don’t always stay dead in Hawkins, Joyce,” Hopper says gently—or, gently for him. Steve doesn’t miss the way both sets of eyes flick to Will.

“Hopper?” a quiet voice calls suddenly in disbelief, and that’s when they all remember El.

Hopper’s face softens like butter, turning to the perfect manifestation of guilt when he looks at her. “Hey, kiddo.”

El stands there, the crowd of people parted around her, and stares at Hopper. “You were alive?”

“Yeah,” he sighs, shrugging. “They grabbed me before the machine blew.”

Joyce blinks in shock, her mouth open, but she doesn’t intrude.

“Where did you go?” El asks. She’s wary, they all can see that, but it’s obvious that barrier she has up is cracking. Her eyes have welled, and the tears start their tracks down her cheeks, soaking dark spots into the green flannel she wore.

Hopper’s lips quirk down. “Bad place,” is all he says, and that does it. El’s face crumples and she chokes on a sob as she rockets herself across the distance between them and into Hopper’s arms. Hopper picks her up and holds her close, his face disappearing into her hair

They stay like that for a solid few minutes, and no one disturbs them. Joyce turns and grabs Smirnoff in a hug of her own, of which he stiffens against for a split second before allowing it and telling her something Steve can’t hear, and Steve returns to mingling with the rest of the kids. It’s about then he realizes Max is looking at Hopper and Smirnoff with something like hope and distress, and it takes Robin elbowing him sharply to get him into motion.

Man, he really was a mom, wasn’t he. Jesus.

“You alright, kid?” he asks her when he reaches her side. “You don’t look so hot.”

Max looks up at him, her face turning into one of her usual expressions, but it doesn’t hold, and she returns to looking troubled immediately. “We had a body,” is all she says, and, there, Steve gets it. Billy wasn’t coming back like Hopper and Smirnoff have. He’d had a casket and everything, even after his body had started to dissolve into the disgusting black tar that made up the Mind Flayer’s poison.

He thinks about his nightmare in the Upside Down, and how that other world had taken Billy, just like it had Barb. The only difference was, Barb had been found dead there, according to Nancy. Billy had died on their side, and that almost made it worse.

“I’m sorry,” Steve tells her quietly, hooking an arm around her shoulders, but she only shakes her head.

“That’s what everyone says. It doesn't fix shit.”

* * *

They fall into a calm of things as they convene inside the empty house, Jonathan driving Nancy to a pay phone to call her mom while Steve and Robin filled the shitheads and Joyce in on what happened. Hopper goes a little more into detail on what happened to him, specifically, but he keeps glancing at the kids when he reaches certain parts, and something about that tells Steve maybe worse was done to him than what he wants to admit with El right there. Steve knows how that goes, so he can’t exactly fault the man.

Like he’d said before, he was taken right before the big freaky machine underground broke down and hauled off to Russia, kept for questioning about the things he knew regarding El and the whereabouts of Dr. Brenner, then returned to Hawkins as an informant for the units they were establishing there under the guise of something they apparently thought the government wouldn’t catch, but that even Steve was a little dubious about. Smirnoff, already having had his foot in the door before the botched assassinanation on him, had never actually left the state, unbeknownst to everyone else involved. Hopper had found the man again when being transferred, and they’d worked together to rescue the “Will” that the kidnappers were bringing in, unaware until the moment of rescue that not only was there no Will, but that there were actually four of the supposed "Wills" instead of just Jonathan.

He still wasn’t happy with that development, but they were alive and well right now, so it wasn’t that big of a deal in Steve’s eyes. (But, then again, a lot of things weren’t, and he seemed to be the outlier in that equation a lot of the time.)

Joyce seems dazed by everything Hopper tells her, but something about Smirnoff seems to be getting to her more than anything else.

_“He didn’t have a pulse_, Hopper,” Joyce insists, sounding a little manic. Smirnoff—Alexei, Steve thinks he should be thinking of him as, because that was apparently his real name—only frowns at Joyce, mumbling something to himself in Russian.

Hopper looms over Joyce, his arms crossed. “You need to stop underestimating these people, Joyce. They opened a number of portals to another world, I think they can revive a man who was shot.”

Joyce holds her head and sighs. “Alright, well,” she starts, sounding like she didn’t want to let it go, but that there wasn’t much choice but to after the information overhaul she’d been given to process, “take over the house. We never sold it, it’s still under my name. You might as well make use of it until we can figure out how the hell we’re going to tell everyone you’re actually alive. Just keep it on the down-low, Hop?”

Hopper rolls his eyes. “I kept a kid secret for a year, Joyce, I think I can hide in a house with an adult for a while.”

Joyce opens her mouth to respond, but she’s stopped when Nancy and Jonathan return, Nancy looking shaken and Jonathan looking worried. Both expressions dissipate to confusion when they see Joyce and Hopper looking like they were facing off despite everything that just happened.

“Have they hugged yet?” Nancy asks bluntly, and both adults start to splutter indignantly.

Alexei, who had remained quiet during everything, looks to Jonathan and Nancy, and then to Joyce and Hopper, frowning at their flustered reaction to Nancy’s question.

After a moment’s contemplation, he walks over to Joyce and Hopper and takes an arm each in his hands. “Hug,” he demands firmly, then steps back and motions for them to do so.

Joyce and Hopper gape at Alexei first, and then each other when Alexei only looks at them with raised eyebrows.

“I don’t know if that’s really—” Joyce hedges while Hopper mutters, “Fucking Russian thinks he’s got a better idea—”

“Just hug, holy shit!” Dustin then offers loudly, saying what they all want to say, and, then, suddenly Joyce is tripping into Hopper’s arms as if she had been pushed there.

Steve blinks along with everyone at the scene, before looking around in confusion until he notices El standing in the back, smiling, with her hand out before her and blood trailing from her nose.

Holy shit, her powers were back.


	15. scars

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oof, sorry, was almost late on this one. Picked up a fun stomach bug and had one hell of a training day at work today, plus this chapter's longer than the usual go. Not a good mix.
> 
> Here you go!

Yet again, things start to settle, just a little, after that. Not enough for them to gain the same false sense of calm they got the other times it happened, but enough for them to catch their breath.

Jonathan gets proper care for his leg (which Joyce was horrified to learn of and demanded to know how the hell Jonathan managed to stab _himself_ in the leg with his own knife), Steve doesn’t bother getting his stitches fixed, and Robin gets grounded for a few days, which affects nothing, because she doesn’t really go anywhere but school and work, where Steve already is, while Steve’s parents are home, because her staying over would be too much to have to explain and neither of them wanted to deal with that.

His parents aren’t thrilled he got in trouble with the police over “running away” for a couple of days (because, apparently, he’d been gone for almost three, though it certainly didn’t feel like it), but they also end up being more alarmed over his ankle than anything, not having known he’d been attacked (again, by a coyote, definitely not by a creature that shouldn't be real) until he showed up in someone else’s clothes (which they didn’t question) with his leg brace holding on for dear life (which they did, because last they saw him, he didn’t have _that_). Turning eighteen had its perks, as few and far between as they ended up being, and the hospital hadn’t called them about his injury because of that.

He’s informed they’ll be leaving for New York in a few days, reminded that the milk was expiring soon and to grab some more so he can have a decent breakfast with it, and then left to his own devices, as per usual. His job isn’t brought up, so he doesn’t have to ask his dad when he can start working for him and stop working under the sadistic thumb of Keith, and he’s pretty okay with that as he takes a much-needed shower and falls into bed that night.

He’s woken too early the next day by his mom telling him someone was on the phone for him, and he picks up to hear Nancy’s voice.

“Do you work today?” she asks instead of greeting him.

“Uh,” he starts intelligently, “er, no. Not that I’m aware of. Why?”

“We’re meeting up at Jonathan’s old house today to clean it up for Hopper while he’s out.”

Steve blinks, the sleep still thick in the corners of his eyes. “Out? How can he be out? He’s supposed to be dead.”

“Mrs. Byers is going to sneak him into her hotel room to get him to shower somehow.” Steve can nearly hear Nancy shrug. “I don’t know, I didn’t ask the details.”

“Oh,” Steve says lamely, then lets his brain play a little catch up. “Wait, what do you mean ‘we’? You have school. So does Robin, and her parents are being anal about it.”

“We’ll be skipping lunch and meeting you over there. You and Jonathan can start and we’ll help during our break.”

“Oh, so you’re making the guys do the brunt of the work, I see,” Steve grumbles, and Nancy laughs. Steve decidedly does not think about how much he’s missed hearing her laugh in his favor.

“See you then!” she chirps cheerily, then hangs up before Steve can say his goodbyes. He stares at the phone for a moment once the call is ended, then sets it back into the cradle with a sigh and goes to get ready for the day.

… After thirty more minutes in his bed, that is.

* * *

Jonathan’s already in the house by the time Steve pulls up to it, a halo of cleaning supplies circling where he stands in the center of what once was the living room with his arms crossed and his face set in a thoughtful expression. He blinks up in surprise when Steve trips over the threshold of the open door, nearly face-planting onto the dusty wood.

“I thought you weren’t going to come,” Jonathan tells him as he helps right Steve on his feet.

“What?” Steve blinks at him in surprise. “Why wouldn’t I come?”

Jonathan shrugs. “I mean, we’ve kind of dragged you through a lot lately. It wouldn’t be weird for you to just opt out of this one.”

Steve scoffs, pushing Jonathan’s shoulder. “Man, no. Cleaning is way better than getting kidnapped or facing a monster. I’d take this any damn day.” He stoops down to pick up a pair of gloves and a cleaning rag. “Besides, I’m pretty much indebted to you after all the times you saved my life, right? Consider me your bitch.”

Jonathan looks stunned, staring at Steve with wide, startled eyes. Steve nearly throws the rag at him.

“I’m kidding, holy shit,” he clarifies for Jonathan, who immediately relaxes again, and Steve does actually throw the rag at him that time.

Jonathan grabs it and throws it back, and they start laughing, grappling for things to clean from the floor, and then going on to tackle what the could get away with doing before the girls arrived and accused them of horsing around like they were undoubtedly going to do instead of cleaning properly. Such of which happens once they hit the bathroom and Steve turns on the sink with his gloved hand crammed against the mouth of the faucet in a way that makes the water spray out and nail Jonathan directly in the face, a trick he learned in the vicious pit of the boy’s locker room.

Needless to say, all they really got cleaned was part of the kitchen and a little bit of the hallway, with the entity of the bathroom soaked in water once Jonathan managed to bodily haul Steve away from the sink in favor of brutal retaliation in addition to Steve and Jonathan themselves.

Honestly, it was Nancy’s fault for assuming either of them would actually get anything done, and more so her fault for ever thinking they wouldn’t just make a bigger mess, and she holds her face in her hands when she and Robin appear on the scene a couple hours later to find Steve and Jonathan sopping wet and scrambling around with the floor cleaner and the mops in an attempt to hide the evidence.

Robin promptly starts to sob with laughter.

“You dinguses are the definition of useless!” she cries between her choking laughs, watching as Jonathan and Steve, slightly soapy and definitely in need of dry clothing, stand on the lawn and bow their heads to Nancy’s annoyed and admittedly also amused reprimanding.

“You can’t go back into the house like that,” she tells them sternly. “You’ll only make a bigger mess.”

“So, we’re done with cleaning for the day, then?” Steve asks hopefully, but Nancy shakes her head.

“I have clothes in the trunk of the car for Hopper, but you’re going to put them on until yours dry.”

That gets Robin laughing again, and Jonathan starts to glower. Steve makes a face, and then shrugs.

“Big deal. Hopper’s old, but it’s just clothing.”

“I don’t really think it’s your style, Stevie Boy,” Robin coos at him.

“I wore a stupid sailor uniform for months,” Steve declares, then starts peeling off his wet shirt and throws it onto the grass with a wet slap, leaving him in his equally-wet undershirt. “I think I can handle whatever you’ve got for me. Give us your _worst_.”

Nancy and Robin look at each other, then back up at Steve and Jonathan. Steve doesn’t really think much of it until they turn to him with smiles that spark a taste of fear on the back of his tongue, and that’s when he realizes he really fucked up somewhere along the line.

“Why did you say that?” Jonathan whines at him in a whisper. “They’re going to do it to me now, too.”

“I don’t use my brain, you know that,” Steve whispers back, just before Nancy takes his hands and yanks him away.

* * *

Hopper either apparently has a somewhat eclectic choice in clothing since leaving the hands of the Russians, or someone else did his shopping for him without letting him know what they were getting, because Steve ends up in Jonathan’s old bedroom in his underclothes with Robin shoving a shirt covered in vibrant shapes into his hands.

“Who the hell threw up on this thing?” he asks wryly, holding the shirt up with two fingers and turning to show it to Jonathan, who was clutching an equally-hideous striped monstrosity between his fingers and glaring daggers at Steve for opening his big mouth.

Steve dramatically flinches away like Jonathan had shot him, completely unperturbed by Jonathan’s wrath, and nearly stumbles into Nancy, who laughs and rights him back on his feet when he steps on his bad ankle wrong and yelps.

“Steve,” Nancy suddenly says, sounding quiet and small. When Steve looks down at her in question, he realizes she’s staring at a point on his neck, one that his shirt collars, and Robin’s necklaces, usually covered.

He slaps a hand on it despite knowing it’s far too late, and Jonathan looks up from where he’s trying to get his legs into a pair of Hopper’s so-many-sizes-too-large slacks.

“Uh,” Steve tries, then looks over at Robin with wide eyes for just a second. “It was just the serum the Russians gave me.”

“Gave us,” Robin corrects, sounding like she’s talking about something casual and not the mark of torture she also wore on her neck.

“Gave us,” Steve agrees. “They were big-ass needles.”

Nancy and Jonathan look at Robin, then at each other, and Steve absolutely does not miss the way they both clench a single hand tighter. It’s the first time he realizes that he did have a scar connecting him to Robin like they did to each other, even if his and Robin’s hadn’t been so willingly gained. Nancy and Jonathan had their matching battle scars, something that kept them anchored to one another, and Steve and Robin had theirs.

“It’s not a big deal,” Steve tries to tell them, but it sounds false even to his ears, and no one bothers to refute it.

* * *

Naturally, they end up getting the most work done during the half-hour Nancy and Robin stay before returning to school and leaving the bathroom, and _only_ the bathroom (because they obviously could not be trusted to do anything more before Joyce showed back up with Hopper and relieved them), for Jonathan and Steve to clean up after the mess they made of it.

“Bet you didn’t see this happening to us,” Steve starts conversationally, stooping yet again to roll the pants leg of Hopper’s annoyingly-long slacks up so it wouldn’t get wet while he cleaned. “All the shit after how douchebaggy I was to you. Now we’re cleaning a house together for our dead cop friend to live in until the world’s ready to know he’s actually still alive. Like, what the fuck is our lives?” Steve laughs, and Jonathan grins at him. “How did I, of all people, get inserted into this narrative?”

“You’re pretty important to me now,” Jonathan muses idly after a moment, his mop making gross squishing noises as he rubs it against the line of the tub to get the water gathered there. “To the whole group, you know? I don’t know if I could see myself, or any of us, facing whatever else is going to happen without you there. We all trust you with our secrets. The kids love you too much for you to not be involved, anyway.”

Steve stops in his tracks, Jonathan's words sending a wrecking ball of guilt slamming into his gut. He nearly doubles over from the way it hits him.

Aw, shit.

“I still love Nancy,” Steve blurts out instead, startling himself, then very nearly slaps his hands over his mouth like a child.

Jonathan hesitates, then turns and just looks at Steve. He looks far too calm about it, Steve thinks, because _Steve_ would probably freak out in his place. “I know,” he says quietly. “I’ve known a while.”

“Seems like I was the last one to catch on,” says Steve nervously, rubbing a hand over his neck. Jonathan’s eyes dart to the motion, and then he drops the mop and lifts his hand to stop it. The mop clatters noisily against the tile.

“It’s alright, you know,” he assures Steve as he removes the hand, pressing his own hand, the one with the scar, on the spot instead, and Steve can swear he feels the way the scars burn hotter than their normal skin when they press together. Jonathan won’t meet Steve’s eyes, but Steve can’t stop staring at him. “I mean, of all people, I get why you can’t let her go.”

Steve swallows on impulse, and it spurs Jonathan’s gaze into flickering up and finally meeting Steve’s. “I think…” he tries, slowly, unsure of where he’s going but knowing he has to get somewhere before he loses his gall, “… I don’t want to let either of you go. When you were gone, when you left Hawkins, everything felt—stupid.”

Jonathan snorts, dispelling the strange moment, and Steve laughs awkwardly when Jonathan’s hand drops from Steve’s neck.

“Stupid,” Jonathan repeats.

_“Wrong,”_ Steve clarifies, and Jonathan clams up, his lips pursing together. Steve’s eyes flick to them, watching how they nearly disappeared into his face when he pressed them tightly, and, for some reason, he feels like he’s thought about them before.

Jonathan saves him from thinking further on that by opening his mouth again and saying, “So, you missed me.”

“We all missed you,” Steve agrees, but Jonathan only looks at him. He looks fragile in that moment, like Steve could reach out and touch him and he’d shatter into a million pieces right then and there. It’s a startling contrast to how he’d been just moments before, and Steve’s not sure what to do about it. “Hey,” he starts, tone hushed. “What’s with the face?”

Jonathan opens his mouth, then shuts it again without saying anything and swallows. He stoops to pick his mop up again and returns to cleaning, leaving Steve standing there bemused at what was going on.

Steve reaches for Jonathan’s arm, causing him to flinch, and Steve releases him again like he’d been shocked.

“Hey, I— Shit, what did I say?” Steve stumbles when Jonathan looks at him.

“Nothing,” Jonathan replies quietly. A moment passes, and then Jonathan looks up, and he looks like the same Jonathan Steve now called his friend and not the Jonathan he’d been just before. “I missed you guys, too, is all,” he says, but Steve thinks somehow it sounds like he’s saying something else. “I missed you guys a lot.”

Steve watches him as he returns to cleaning and realizes he wishes Jonathan had said something else.

Something _more._

What, though, Steve didn’t have a clue. He just knows he wants it, and that, somewhere in his chest, he felt suddenly empty without it.

* * *

Steve closes his eyes that night filled with confusion over himself and his feelings for what he now realizes is more than just the girl he tried so hard to convince himself he was over, when everyone else knew better, worn and wanting to push it all away to deal with another time, when maybe things would make a little more sense.

He opens his eyes to find himself lying on the floor of a dark forest, flat on his back, with the Demogorgan screaming above him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tomorrow's may also be a little later in the day, depending on how it goes. I will try my DAMNDEST not to let it be late, though! (Regardless, it will come, late or not.)


	16. pinned down

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one's short, but not for lack of time. It just panned out how I wanted it to in fewer words than expected, and I think it might be my favorite I've written so far.
> 
> (Don't ask me the mechanics tho. I'm just making this up as I go, I have no flippin' idea what's going to happen next or how tf any of this is going to work. That's a problem for future me.)

Steve starts screaming back. There’s no other way to put it.

He screams at the Demogorgan screaming at him as it pins him to the forest floor with arms and legs and screams its open, ugy flower face inches away from his own, the world a spider web of dust and blood-red veins above them.

He struggles as hard as he can, wrestling his arms and his legs and his whole body against the force of the Demogorgan bearing all its weight on him, but it’s no use. The thing is heavy, and Steve hasn’t been doing much working out since he graduated high school and lost basketball as his mandated exercise regime.

He can’t get away. He screams louder. The monster pushes in.

Then, the ground starts to shake. Not in an off-the-scale earthquake kind of way—a low rumble, like a dragon coming to life underneath of them. It vibrates all along Steve’s back, making the monster hesitate. It doesn’t move, it’s still heavy enough for Steve to know he’s not getting away, but it’s frozen still, like a predator animal that’s just encountered something bigger than them.

Everything stops.

They hesitate, Steve and his monster—Steve heaving air he can’t seem to keep in his lungs and the monster with slow, tentative, curling movements of its mouth.

Nothing happens. Dread slowly starts to pool in Steve’s gut.

The Demogorgan turns back to Steve, opens its mouth wide, _so fucking wide_, and, once again, Steve starts to scream. Because screaming is all he can do.

And the monster strikes.

_“NO!”_

The word booms out like a command, thundering through the dank forest and whipping through Steve’s very core, shattering his senses until he can’t even think of his own name. The Demogorgan reels back, howling, and _things_ erupt from the ground and wrap jagged thorns as long as Steve’s arm into its legs and torso.

Barely returned to his senses, Steve scrambles back and away as fast as he can while it struggles to free itself from the encroaching threat, only to thrust himself against the dirty, ripped jeans of the owner of the voice hard enough that his teeth clack together and his neck crackles with pain.

Furious, with blue eyes that blazed red in their whites and a body spidered with thick black veins, Billy Hargrove looks down at Steve and tells him, “How many times to I have to tell you to plant your _fucking _feet, Harrington!”

Steve nearly laughs, he's so startled. He doesn’t know what else to do.

Billy turns away, lifting his face to the monster again, then raises his fisted hands and roars. The sound reverberates through the evil, and the trees answer his call. Steve watches, propped against Billy’s legs, as they pull from the earth like those creatures from the fantasy cartoons and lumber towards the Demogorgan, still thrashing against the hold of the vines.

They grapple the Demogorgan into a hold even as it struggles against them, screeching and roaring and twisting, and, slowly, Billy opens his outstretched fists, uncurling them out like claws, his fingers shaking with the effort, and something within the veins pulses red.

The monster starts struggling harder, _harder_, wrenching itself in great spasms as the ropes pulse red, black, red, black, and the creature’s skin starts to spider up with the same thick, black veins Steve has seen before.

_“It looks like it's … poisoned,”_ Nancy’s voice echoes in Steve’s head.

With a final, deafening howl, the monster throws itself to one side with its entire body, dislodging one of the tree creatures, and crawls its way free, tearing the vines up by their roots and rendering them useless. It bolts into the distance as soon as its gained the ability to, and Steve watches in horror as it melts into the night, its cries echoing hauntingly through the dark, disturbing air.

“Dammit,” Billy says softly, and Steve startles. He’d been so engrossed in the monster that, for a moment, he’d completely forgotten Billy was there.

Billy reaches down and grabs Steve under the armpits before Steve can even think, hauling him to his feet with no effort on Steve’s part. Once steady, Steve turns to Billy, his mouth working around words he can’t seem to figure out how to speak right in that second.

“Is everyone okay?” Billy asks before Steve can figure out how to use a skill he’d been taught before he learned how to stop shitting his pants, but Billy’s eyes aren’t on Steve. They’re searching through the wood, eyes snapping in every direction.

Despite how straightforward the question is, Steve’s brain doesn’t compute it. “What?” he asks, his voice cracking.

Billy whips to face Steve, and Steve jumps. “Is everyone _safe_ up there, Harrington? Is it gone? The _other_ one?"

Steve stares at Billy. “The— The Demogorgan?” he stumbles. “Yeah—yes. Got its head blown off. We’re safe. It’s dead meat.”

Billy’s face melts into relief. It’s such a strange sight coming from the guy Steve had barely known before he had been killed that Steve can only blink, stunned at its appearance.

“Good,” Billy says with a nod, almost sounding like he’s talking to himself. He looks up again, like he hears something. “He’s coming,” Billy whispers cryptically.

And then he turns and vanishes into the dark, leaving Steve to the dark of the wood and whatever was coming from within it.

“W-wait!” Steve calls, jolting with his hand out towards the empty air. “Hey! You can’t just leave me here!”

“Steve?” a new voice—a young voice—calls from behind him, pulling his attention away from the Houdini Billy had pulled. “What are _you_ doing here?”

Steve turns, and there’s _Will_, staring at him like he can’t comprehend the idea of Steve at all.

“You’re—not supposed to be here,” Will declares haltingly, his mouth pulling into a deep, confused frown. “How—” he starts, then cuts himself off and looks up sharply, his eyes searching the burnt sky, veined with red. “You need to leave,” he says without looking at Steve again, his voice low and dark. “You need to leave. _Now._ Wake up, Steve,” Will orders, then looks directly at Steve, and suddenly something feels like it’s punching Steve square in the chest.

_“Wake up!”_

* * *

Steve wakes up with a start so great it throws him from his bed, one thought stolen from somewhere else blasting through his skull on a loop.

Billy wasn’t dead.

_Billy wasn’t dead._


	17. "stay with me"

Steve calls Jonathan in a panic before the sleep has even left his eyes, before he had pulled from his groggy heart-attack of an awakening and maybe thought out how calling Jonathan while freaking out and asking where his brother is might look when they’re in the middle of a disaster as it was.

He calls before he has control of the rational part of his brain, and he about sends Jonathan into a coma with the way he breathes heavily into the phone and asks, frantically, _“Where’s Will?!”_

“Will?” Jonathan repeats, suddenly on full alert, when just before he’d sounded a little sleepy himself. There’s a sound of fabric scratching against the plastic of the phone as Jonathan does something, and Steve can feel the sigh of relief Jonathan releases into the mouthpiece when he replaces it. “He’s asleep, in his room,” Jonathan confirms, and Steve relaxes, but only for a second, because then he remembers Will’s words.

“Wake him up,” Steve orders.

“What?”

“Wake him up, Jonathan,” Steve pushes, all the sleep gone in favor of urgency.

Jonathan flounders. “What— Why would I— Jesus, okay, fine, _Will._” The sound goes far away again, the phone possibly being placed somewhere while Jonathan woke his little brother.

A few moments pass with nothing but muffled conversation, one voice groggy and the other urgent.

Then Steve hears a very faint “Oh. Crap.” and the phone is picked up, and it’s not Jonathan on the line.

“Okay, don’t freak out,” Will warns, his voice sleep-coarse. Steve clamps his teeth together to keep from saying something along the lines of _“of course I’m freaking out”_ and derailing the conversation. “Jonathan, El, and I will meet you at the junkyard and explain, okay? You have to promise not to flip out on me, though.”

Steve doesn’t answer. He can hear Will’s breath quicken when his silence becomes obvious, and that makes him feel bad, so he ends up relenting. “I can’t promise anything when I just woke up from a nightmare with you in it,” he grids out.

“Yeah, and I’ll _explain_, oh my god,” Will says in exasperation, sounding exactly like the teenager he was. “Just meet us there in twenty minutes.”

Will hands the phone back to Jonathan, and Jonathan’s confusion is palpable through the earpiece. “Should I be as worried as I am right now?” he asks tentatively.

“Probably. Bring Nancy,” Steve says without thinking about it, and Jonathan doesn’t even question it before agreeing and hanging up.

It’s not until after the conversation is over that Steve realizes he never said anything about El.

* * *

He’s the first one there, mostly because he threw himself into the shower the moment he hung up and tossed on clothes without really paying attention to them, and the group as a whole looks mildly shocked when they step out of the car and find Steve pacing in the dirt not far from where he’d been attacked, half a mess and with his unstyled hair (something he’s pretty sure none of them have ever seen before) wild against his forehead.

“Oh, shit,” he hears Jonathan half-whisper, and he looks up to see him sharing a worried look with Nancy. Will and El hover by the sidelines, Will looking a little guilty and El looking resolute. Steve waves his hand quickly to get them moving, and pushes his hair away from his face in an attempt to at least slightly render it less shocking, despite knowing the move is futile without his hairspray to help. He doesn’t bother going to his car to grab a can, though.

Instead, he stands up straight and glares down at Will and El from between Nancy and Jonathan once they’re close enough.

“Alright, you little shits,” he starts, pointing first at Will, and then at El, even though he still didn’t know what she had to do with anything or why she was even there in the first place. “Tell me why the fuck you were in my nightmare last night.”

Jonathan looks at Nancy again, alarmed.

“Uh, Steve—” Nancy starts gently, but Steve raises his hands.

“It wasn’t a real nightmare. Remember that night after I got attacked, I just about had a seizure in my sleep from my nightmare? Yeah,” he continues when both Nancy and Jonathan nod hesitantly, “wasn’t a nightmare. Not really. _He,”_ Steve emphasizes, pointing at Will, “knows what’s going on, even though I don’t. Explain, kid. Before I check myself into the loony bin and you end up one monster hunter short.”

Jonathan, his face blank with shock and pale as Steve’s ever seen it, slowly turns to look at Will, waiting for any reasoning to come to light.

Will looks at El from under his lashes, and El looks back at him face-on. When they look back at Steve, Jonathan, and Nancy again, Steve can feel his heart sinking straight into his stomach.

“There’s something I haven’t told you guys yet,” Will admits, and his eyes are on Jonathan alone.

“We haven’t,” El clarifies for him, and Will shrugs a nod.

“Right, yeah. _We._ Um.” He hesitates, taking a breath. “Don’t freak out, okay?” he half-warns Jonathan, and Jonathan immediately tenses up completely. As if acting on instinct, Steve reaches out and gasps Jonathan’s shoulder in the same motion Nancy reaches for his hand, and they share a glance from behind Jonathan’s bowed head, something unnameable passing between them.

“Don’t think he can promise that,” Steve says when Jonathan doesn’t answer Will. “Don’t think _I_ can promise that, either.”

Will frowns at Steve, blinking like he was confused, then nods once, hesitantly, then once more, resolutely, and sighs. “Well, alright. El and I,” he starts, gesturing between himself and El, “we can Walk.”

Steve doesn’t get it. Neither do Jonathan and Nancy, apparently, because they only look at each other.

“Congratulations?” Steve tries.

El laughs a huff of a laugh. “No. Walk, in our sleep.”

“Sleep-walking,” Steve tries, then snaps his fingers. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have an uncle who does that. Eats everything in the fridge and doesn’t remember it in the morning. Sometimes he wakes up in his lawn. Weird shit,” he muses, looking at Nancy and Jonathan, who only look back at him with pained looks. Steve blinks, realizing they all were staring at him. “What?”

Will presses his palm to his face.

“Not sleep-walking, Steve,” he says as if he’s explained it a dozen times already and Steve still wasn’t getting it. “Walking, while we sleep. We call it Walking, but I guess it’s more like a transcendence of consciousness, according to Dustin.”

“Wait, wait, hold up,” Steve cuts in, using his hand like an axe through the air. “Henderson knows about this?”

Will and El share a look again. Jonathan groans.

“You told your friends, but you didn’t tell us?” he whines, sounding just like the Jonathan Steve knows, meaning he couldn’t be _too_ upset, which also meant he didn’t really understand. He should be flipping his shit, Steve thinks, because Steve’s about two steps from doing exactly that himself.

Will shrugs. “I mean, at first, I didn’t realize what we were doing. Why freak Mom out if I can’t even tell if it’s real?”

Jonathan makes a face like he knows Will is right in his logic, but he doesn’t want to admit that. It’s a look with a striking resemblance to Joyce, proving his genetics were stronger than Steve previously thought.

“How long have you been doing it?” Nancy, always the logical one that cut through bullshit with her razor-sharp wit, asks before Jonathan can say anything else.

“Only about a week,” El says. “Doesn’t always happen. Only some nights.”

“Your powers,” Steve says suddenly, looking at El in surprise. “You just got your powers back, too.”

El nods. “Something’s changed.”

“The Russians,” Will and Nancy say at the same time, Nancy with a tone of realization and Will with one of admittance, telling Steve they’d already thought a lot about this whole ordeal.

“So you … can walk around the Upside Down?” Steve tries. “While you’re asleep?”

Will and El both nod.

“How?” Steve pushes when they don’t offer anything, getting a little impatient now.

“Mind Flayer,” El says simply. Steve shakes his head at her, wanting more.

“He possessed me,” Will continues slowly, pointing at himself, and then points down at El’s leg, “and he attacked and got inside of El. We think that’s why we can access the Upside Down sometimes, we have a connection to it.”

Jonathan and Nancy are silent. When Steve dares a look at them, they look like they’re overloaded with information. Considering Nancy was usually pretty good with filing this shit away, Steve knows this might be just a little _too_ much after the constant shocks they’ve been getting.

But then Nancy speaks, correcting Steve’s wrong assumption, “So you two can get into the Upside Down even though we closed our gate?”

“Not physically,” Will corrects, “but yeah, basically we can get in there and wander around. We’ve been scouting for the Flayer, but we haven’t found anything.”

“Wait, back up, back up,” Steve says, shaking his hands like they could push the conversation back. “What the hell does this have to do with me? I wasn’t attacked by the Mind Flayer. I was bitten by a Demogorgan.”

“And you’re going into the Upside Down, too?” Nancy asks.

“Uh, duh,” Steve replies. “Why else would I have called Jonathan this morning demanding to talk to his little brother? I’m not _that_ weird.”

Will smiles sheepishly, but doesn’t offer commentary on that.

Jonathan peers at Steve, looking pained. “There was something wrong with the Demogorgan that attacked you, though. Do you think there was something about it that could have triggered the whole—” Jonathan stops and finishes his sentence with a vague hand gesture they all can understand.

Steve blinks, the memory of the Demogorgan of last night springing up, and he claps his hands together. “Holy shit, right, I forgot. I think I know why it looked like it was poisoned. Billy attacked the other one last night, and he did something funky to it. He was controlling the trees and shit, saved my fucking skin.” He doesn’t mention how he knows Billy was actually alive, despite the fact they’d definitely buried Billy last summer. He didn’t think now was the time, when he couldn’t actually offer anything to prove his statement and wasn’t even sure it was his in the first place.

He doesn’t end up having a chance to anyway, though, because silence meets his eureka moment. Slowly, he looks around, and none of the expressions he finds makes him feel anything close to comfortable with whatever was happening.

“Steve,” Will starts slowly, and he sounds scared. “Billy isn’t in the Upside Down.”

“Yeah, he is,” says Steve, trying not to sound unsure. “I’ve seen him twice now. He attacked a Demogorgan for me. Saved me with his weird powers.”

Will looks at El, and El worriedly looks back.

“I’ve never seen him,” Will tells her quietly.

“The trees?” she whispers back, though not quietly enough for them not to be heard by everyone else.

“I thought that was the Mind Flayer.”

El goes silent, her lips pressed together in thought.

Steve clears his throat. “I know what I saw, you two. It was Billy fucking Hargrove.”

Will shakes his head. “You don’t understand what you’re telling me, Steve.”

Steve huffs, getting really annoyed with everything now, and he feels a hand grip onto the back of his shirt. He knows it’s Jonathan without having to look. He deflates, but only just.

“Then tell me what I’m telling you,” he says, and he sounds almost as tired as he feels.

Will sighs. Looks at El one more time. Then looks Steve right in the eye.

“You’re telling me that Billy now controls the Upside Down, Steve,” Will tells him gravely. He looks away again, hesitates, and then says, “You’re telling me that _Billy_ is the Mind Flayer.”

And Steve nearly chokes. _“What?”_

* * *

No one knows what to do with that information once it’s spoken, so nothing is done. Steve can’t explain himself, and he feels too lost in the confusion to do anything but get increasingly riled up, so they let it go, at least for the moment. Jonathan ends up packing the kids back into the car and dropping them off at Hopper’s, where the other kids have convened, while Nancy and Steve drive to Nancy’s so Steve can calm down a little. They meet in Nancy’s room some odd amount of time later, with Nancy meeting Jonathan at the door and bringing him up, cups of coffee in her and his hands, while Steve lies spread-eagle on Nancy’s bed and doesn’t think about anything at all.

They spend a few hours from there thankfully not questioning Steve further about his apparent ability to walk the other world with two of the kids despite only having gotten attacked by a Demogorgan, nor how apparently Billy possibly attacking and poisoning the Demogorgan that attacked Steve not only gave Steve said ability but also made him the Mind Flayer (_???_ is all Steve’s brain can offer to that, because that absolutely didn’t make any sense to him) that now had control of the Upside Down.

They spend those hours instead lying around listening to the radio, laughing about the homework Jonathan had been mailed by his school when Joyce somehow managed to inform them he wasn’t coming back anytime soon (apparently a few family members were dying, all at once, or something like that) and then helping him with it in the form of Nancy actually trying to walk him through it and Steve leaning his back against Jonathan’s and reading off the wrong answers to the flashcards he was supposed to be quizzing Jonathan on, which eventually gets him in trouble with Nancy when she returns to her room, food in hand, to find Jonathan having a conniption over getting every answer wrong and Steve nearly dying from holding in his haughtiness over a well-executed prank.

It’s about noon by the time they’re too wired to continue sitting around doing nothing physical, so they throw themselves into Steve’s car and hit the corner mart, revived by the demolition of the shopping mall, to grab all the different things they can think of that might make studying for Jonathan and Nancy more interesting (Steve finds more food than anything really useful, but that’s just Steve for you), and when they return to Nancy’s house Steve’s already forgotten his nightmare in favor of mixing gummy bears in a blender with ice cream (“It’s chemistry! Look!” “Steve, that’s not how it works.”) and then chips when it’s rendered too plain (“You’d be surprised what kind of shit people will order at an ice cream parlor,” he tells Jonathan and Nancy, who look on with slightly green expressions.), and it all turns out not to be too bad.

Evening comes, and it finds the three of them back in Nancy’s room, Steve hanging off the bed with a headache caused by too much sugar and Nancy and Jonathan sitting together with their heads bowed as they tried to solve for X. Steve notices the time at that point, and he pulls himself up and declares he probably should leave before his parents decided he wasn’t going to be around for dinner than night and had it without him. Jonathan looks at the clock in surprise, then stands up, too, shoving his rolled homework in his back pocket.

They both look to Nancy, but she doesn’t stand up with them. She sits there on the floor of her room, small in her pink and white sweater and jeans, her hair a cloud of curls around her head, and she shakes her head, just once.

“Stay with me,” Nancy says, and Steve stands there awkwardly while he waits for Jonathan to either agree or have an excuse not to so he can say his goodbyes, though what excuse Jonathan could ever have is beyond Steve, because _he_ certainly never had one.

But then Jonathan doesn’t say anything at all, and when Steve turns to look at him to figure out why, he finds Jonathan looking at him, and realizes Nancy’s question had been for Steve.

“Me?” he clarifies, even though they’re both looking at him expectantly.

“You,” she agrees, amused, and that’s how Steve finds himself curled on the floor of Nancy’s bedroom next to Jonathan, clad in clothing borrowed from Jonathan’s car, exiled away from the bed when Mrs. Wheeler pops her head in and realizes both boys are staying the evening, and by extension most likely the night, and lays down her usual rules of the house. She doesn’t tell them they can’t stay, though, and Steve thinks that might have something to do with how he looks, because he still hasn’t styled his hair, and he’s pretty sure Mrs. Wheeler doesn’t even recognize him for a moment when she looks at him.

“Dinner’s in an hour,” she informs them as her last words before she leaves them to their own devices again, and Steve decides he really can’t believe his luck after the disaster that was his morning.

When the night comes, Nancy ends up on the floor with Steve and Jonathan instead of in her bed, all the blankets a nest on the floor. Steve slowly ends up on the outskirts of the pile, worried about how his night might go if the nightmare starts up again and he “Walks”, as the kids put it, but that ends up being futile when Jonathan and Nancy, with Nancy on Jonathan’s other side once they realize why Steve’s inching away, follow in Steve’s wake, and tell him to shut up when he tries to protest.

And in that moment, Steve thinks maybe everything will be alright.

One of these days, he really will learn better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My last two brain cells when it comes to working this whole story:


	18. muffled scream

Steve doesn’t Walk that night, but he does have a nightmare.

He usually has a nightmare of some kind. It’s more rare for him to not.

Unfortunately for him, it’s one of the bad ones. One of the ones he’d usually spend the day following it with Robin, because she got them too, and only she really understood how to deal with their fallout.

Unfortunately for him, it’s not just one of the bad ones. Unfortunately for him, the nightmares have started to evolve.

* * *

He’s sitting in _the room_, the one they had put him in when they’d wanted to get him away from Robin and question him about who he was and who he worked for, when they hadn’t believed him when he’d told the truth, even though he was in that stupid uniform that, _come on_, no self-respecting teenager would ever be caught dead in if it weren’t mandated. Just sitting, waiting. There’s no one else in there, and all he can hear is the slow, steady sound of what he thinks is a leak, despite them being miles and miles underground.

(He guesses even evil Russians have to take a piss, so there must be bathrooms somewhere around this stupid place. He just kind of wishes they’d take better care of their plumbing, because that noise was going to drive him insane way faster than the anticipation of getting interrogated will if they take their sweet time.)

It’s quiet, save for that dripping leak, and it’s … _fuzzy_. A sure-fire sign that this was only happening in Steve’s head, if only he could be capable of realizing that, which most people aren’t when in the throes of their own unconscious wrath. Another sign would be the fact time seems to be stretching in the same way it feels as if it’s snapping through him, but, again, unconscious mind? Total bastard.

Steve doesn’t realize he’s dreaming, and he never does. Not until he’s awake and his face is intact and he’s gulping down iron-laced mouthfuls of air like he’d actually been waterboarded and not just beaten until he’d forgotten his own name to the darkness.

He does know, however, that he’s waiting. He’s waiting for the Russian to come in, the one who speaks English, so he can tell him yet again, like he’s done so many times before, that he just worked in the goddamned mall, and he wasn’t even smart enough to get into technical school, for fuck’s sake, so why the hell would the American government use him as a spy? It’s was the truth—it was always the truth—and yet they never believed him.

Steve knows he’s waiting. He knows he’s sitting, he knows he’s waiting, and he knows he’s going to lose his _fucking_ mind if that drip _doesn’t stop._

The drip stops. Suddenly, and abruptly. And the murmuring starts up.

That’s new. Steve doesn’t remember murmuring.

He turns his head slightly, causing the room to swirl and flicker black. He’d turn it more, but something is holding it in place. He can’t see anything, but he knows it’s there, whatever it is. He can feel it pressing, feel it caging him in. He thinks maybe he should be panicking about that, but his heart is already pounding, and he knows the Russians are coming.

Steve just wants to get out. He wants to go home.

He wants to find Robin, escape, and never think about any of this again.

He knows that’ll never happen. Because it’s already passed, and you can’t erase something that’s already been done.

Dammit, he should have been more careful.

The murmuring stops. Steve feels his heart rocket into his throat.

They were coming. They were always coming.

They were coming and they were going to kick his ass when he couldn’t fight back because they would ask him who he worked for and he would tell them Scoops Ahoy because it was the truth and they wanted the truth but not _that_ truth and that was all he had and holy shit he’d been too fucking stupid to go to school so he’d been forced to work for an ice cream place in a mall and that was the truth for the love of god _it was the truth_ look at him look at what he was wearing _look at him look at his outfit do you think he just wears this—_

And they wouldn’t listen. Because even when Steve was telling the truth, he was bullshit.

God, he was always bullshit.

The door slams open, and it’s not the Russians who stand in the doorway.

The door slams open, and the _Demogorgan_ stands in the doorway. Dark, looming, red mouth open and poised for attack.

Steve starts screaming before it does, his leg starting up a burning swath of fire that encompasses his entire left side, and then, suddenly, he can’t breathe.

Hands slap over his mouth, muffling him just as he starts to scream, sending him into a breathless sort of panic that borders on an animalistic kind of response. He writhes against the force of them, his mind racing with an incoherent howling that may have once been rational thoughts before they were subjected to his terror, his panic, and it’s not until he feels something warm pressing against his cheek that he’s jarred back into reality.

He abruptly stops struggling with a start, his eyes snapping open to see Jonathan hovering above him, panicked and stricken, and a mass of brown curly hair peeking out from one side of his peripherals.

It was Nancy’s cheek against his—she was lying nearly on him, holding him down, and it was Jonathan’s hands that had kept him from waking up the whole house with his screaming.

_Shit_, he thinks, because that’s the only word he can comprehend. _Shit._

He breathes against Nancy’s weight, trying desperately to slow his heart, his pulse thundering in his ears so loud that he can’t hear what Jonathan is saying even as his lips move with speech. He closes his eyes again, and Jonathan removes his hands. Steve still feels the way his fingertips linger just before they’re removed completely, as if he wasn’t sure Steve would start screaming again without warning. Jonathan doesn’t move away, Steve can still feel his presence in a way he doesn’t think he’d have been able to before he’d met his maker more than a few times and his instincts had been forced into overdrive, but he doesn’t encroach on Steve, and Steve realizes he kind of really wishes he would.

The help him up once his breathing finally slows, Jonathan collapsing back down behind him when Steve nearly falls back from a sudden loss of strength, his knees pressing into Steve’s hips from behind and Nancy’s hands grabbing first Steve’s arms, then his shoulders, and then finally his face when he’s fully, steadily upright but won’t—_can’t_—meet her eyes.

“Steve?” Nancy calls him, gently, _too gently_, and that’s when Steve finally breaks.

He tells them everything, sitting there with Nancy’s hands on his face and Jonathan’s face pressed into the back of his hair. The investigation, the running, the capture in favor of letting the kids get free, the interrogation that left him with a fractured eye socket, three loose teeth, and the phantom taste of blood in the back of his throat whenever he woke up from too intense a dream. The serum that he sometimes wished he still had to take, because it had made everything okay for the short while it was in his system, and the scar it had left behind.

He tells them it all, stumbling, sometimes rushing, as he works his way through the story, the one he usually put behind him and allowed himself to forget, the one he could leave buried away up until his subconscious decided that wasn’t allowed, and forgetting could mean his demise.

He tells them, and he watches them as they take it all in.

Rather, he watches Nancy, because she stays in front of him, her hands eventually falling from his face to cover her own, her eyes growing wider and wider when he drops a new detail he had never told anyone but Robin, because she’d been there, and she’d deserved to know everything she’d missed.

He _feels_ Jonathan, who stays behind Steve, his legs bent and his knees holding Steve against him, woozy from his sudden awakening and sharp panic to the point where he’d simply rested his face in the back of Steve’s head, nestled in that famous hair. Steve could feel his nose, cold, pressed against the hollow of his skull, just before it started to turn into neck, and he can feel Jonathan’s sharp inhales more than he can hear them each time they happen. He can feel the tension in Jonathan’s shoulders, in his chest, from where they touch Steve’s back when he’s shifted, his head pounding and his teeth aching from how hard he’d been clenching them in his sleep.

He tells them everything, and they don’t let him go.

When he’s finished, he sits there, exhausted and fading, his eyes going glazed and hazy from where they couldn’t hold onto anything. No one moves, but he can hear both of them breathing.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Nancy asks after enough time has passed for Steve to think maybe he’s fallen back asleep. Her voice is small, so much smaller than he thinks he’s ever heard it before, and Steve feels like an asshole right in that moment.

God, he was such _bullshit._

“Didn’t want to upset anyone,” is all Steve has to say in return, because it was the truth. And, like it or not, Steve was better when it came to the truth. He wasn’t the person he used to be.

He doesn’t see Nancy’s expression when she drops her head, but he doesn’t think he wants to. He feels bad enough, and he knows it would only make him feel worse.

“That’s why you’re so close to Robin, isn’t it,” Jonathan says from behind him, his words ghosting warmly along Steve’s scalp. “She was the one you had to go to when it was all done.”

“Didn’t have to,” Steve corrects, because dammit, Robin was everything to him, in all the ways she could be, and he didn’t want anyone to think they’d been forced together in the aftermath of what they’d created between them. “I love Robin,” Steve says then, more a breath of admittance than a declaration, and both Nancy and Jonathan tense up like someone had been shot. Steve closes his eyes, wishing he’d allowed his brain to go before his mouth and word that better, like he never did, ever.

“You said she wasn’t your girlfriend,” Nancy says, sounding lost.

“She’s not,” Steve agrees.

“But you love her?”

“Of course I do. I can’t not love her, she’s amazing.”

He feels Jonathan shift, but he doesn’t open his eyes. He doesn’t want to.

“So it’s an,” Jonathan starts, then pauses, and Nancy picks up with, “unrequited thing?”

Steve laughs. It makes his throat hurt, like he’d actually screamed for hours, and not just for the few seconds when he’d first been waking up. “No,” he whispers. “No, it’s not.”

“But—” Nancy starts, but Steve stops her by opening his eyes again. She looks befuddled, and it makes Steve start laughing again.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” he admits. “I love her like I love the kids, except maybe more. Y’know? Like she’s … super important to me, but not in a way that I would crush on her. I can’t anyway, I’m not her type.”

Jonathan snorts, but doesn’t say anything.

“Right?” Steve agrees. “Crazy, not her type. But I’m not. And it’s not like that, anyway. I love her so fucking much, but not like that.”

Silence meets his words. He watches Nancy, who watches him back quizzically, like she can’t understand anything he’s just told her. He doesn’t blame her, because he doesn’t really understand it himself. He only feels it, and that’s about all he can give it.

“I love you guys like that, too,” he blurts out suddenly, and he’s surprised to find it tastes like a lie.

Nancy blinks at him. Her mouth opens, but nothing comes out. She looks to Steve’s side, where Jonathan undoubtedly is, and Steve realizes Jonathan’s probably already told her the truth: that Steve still loved Nancy like he used to, and he hadn’t been able to let her go.

But neither of them call him out on it. They only hold him in silence, with Jonathan’s arms wrapping around him from behind as Nancy leans in and buries her face in Steve’s chest. And then they all lie back down again, exhaustion overtaking them as one, Steve between them both and only half-aware of anything happening around him.

He’s on the cusp of falling back under when he hears Jonathan’s breathing hitch, and his senses snap back to alert. But there’s nothing there, and Jonathan’s words are warm against the back of Steve’s neck when he speaks.

“We love you too, you know,” Jonathan says.

He feels Nancy nod her agreement, even though he can’t see her.

“More than,” she says, so faintly he almost doesn’t hear her, and, as he finally starts to fall asleep again, he thinks, _Now that’s the real bullshit._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I may have slightly stolen some of the general ideas of Steve's "love" from the second chapter of my other Stranger Things fic, _From What We Could Become (from what we'll never be),_ but that second chapter isn't published yet, so it's free real estate.
> 
> (Just don't be surprised if you also see some of it over there, because that's what it was originally for. I'm unoriginal, what can I say.)


	19. asphyxiation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoops, nearly missed this one. Weekends are my kryptonite, because I'm not always sure I'll be home. Also, sorry for the potentially exponential typos, I didn't proofread this one.
> 
> (I'll do it later...)

Steve’s awakened the next day by Nancy shaking him awake and Jonathan mumbling something incomprehensible from beside him.

“You guys need to wake up,” she urges, and Steve can see she’s somehow already dressed when he squints at her.

“Humgh?” he tries, grunting when Jonathan rolls over and nearly smacks him in the face with _his_ face. Steve pushes him away, and Jonathan makes something vaguely resembles a noise of offense.

_“Boys,”_ another voice says, and Steve jolts into a sitting position, yanking the covers up to his chest, and nearly takes out Jonathan’s nose in the process.

“Robin?!” Steve squawks in the same motion that Jonathan yelps and flinches to awareness.

_“Steve!”_ he screeches, but Steve ignores him.

Robin grins. “Don’t pretend to be demure,” she mocks him, her hands on her hips. “I’ve seen you in your underwear, dude.”

Steve glowers at her, even as she grabs his arms and hauls him to his feet so he can get dressed. Jonathan follows sluggishly, throwing Steve a look that could nearly be considered dark, had it not come from someone who looked like he was basically still asleep.

“Mind explaining why you’re making us get up so early on a weekend?” Steve decides to question, but only after he’s already shed his borrowed pajamas in favor of his jeans and shirt, discarded from yesterday on the floor.

Jonathan mumbles something in agreement.

“Joyce and Hopper want us over at their place,” she starts cheerfully, sitting on her bed and showing Robin pictures pulled from God knows where. She looks up to meet Steve’s eyes, and that’s when Steve realizes the cheer is a facade.

“Why do they want us over?” he inquires further, tentatively, with a sense of foreboding growing deep in his gut. Could they not just get _one_ break?

“She wouldn’t say,” Nancy continues nonchalantly, and Robin smiles a grimace, apparently just as in on it as the rest of them. “However, I caught Hopper ordering Will and El not to leave the premises in the background, so that might tell you something.”

Steve looks at Jonathan, and Jonathan looks back in horror.

“They didn’t,” Steve whispers. “They _didn’t_ tell them.”

* * *

“You _told_ them?!” Steve screeches incredulously, about an hour later, and only Will winces in response.

“Yeah, they told us!” Hopper yells back, throwing his hands up. “You should have told us the first time it started happening!”

“We didn’t know it was real,” El tells him calmly, tilting her head at him in a way that begged for him to challenge her. “Why scare if we don’t know it’s real?”

“That was _my_ argument,” Will mumbles sourly, sounding exactly like Jonathan, and Steve nearly lets out an inappropriate laugh.

“Because we’re your parents,” Joyce tells them soothingly, a total contrast to Hopper. Seriously, they were like fire and ice when it came to the parenting schtick. “You should feel safe coming to us when scary things happen.”

Will and El look at each other.

“Uh,” Will tries. “Not that I don’t love you, Mom,” he starts, and Joyce tilts her head away, eyebrows drawing together, “but it was less of a ‘this is scary’ kind of thing and more of a ‘how much will this freak everyone out’ kind of thing that we were dealing with here.”

Joyce hesitates, then looks at Hopper, at a loss. Hopper just raises his eyebrows and looks back.

“It is the Upside Down,” Steve offers, and gets an elbow in his side for his efforts. Whose elbow, he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t get a chance to ask when a commotion coming from outside signals the arrival of Mike, Lucas, Dustin, and Max, all riding in on their respective bikes, which they dump on the lawn before barreling in through the door, bickering about something Steve can’t discern from the way they’re talking over each other to get their point across.

“Who invited all the children?” Steve hears Hopper mutter in annoyance, and Joyce replies, “It wasn’t me.”

Alexei comes rushing out of Jonathan’s old room and into the living room, where they had all converged, looking around the group and looking up at Hopper in confusion, a large piece of paper crumpled between his hands. Hopper just shakes his head and gestures to the couch they’d filched from the junkyard the other day, intact enough to be decent for Hopper and Alexei’s standards. Alexei sits and waits for the commotion to calm down.

“We need an air horn or something,” Steve declares when the volume only rises, the voices of Max and Mike becoming the loudest, as Robin breaks away from the huddle the four older teenagers made and goes to peer down at Alexei. Steve still has no idea what they’re arguing about and, at this point, he really doesn’t care.

Nancy looks at him. Then Jonathan does. And, when Will and Joyce join, that’s when Steve realizes it’s on him.

He sighs, and then he takes a deep breath.

“ALRIGHT, SHITHEADS,” he bellows, and everyone in the vicinity flinches like he’d dropped a bomb. “SHUT THE HELL UP AND SAVE IT FOR LATER. WE GOT SHIT TO DO.”

“Thank you, Steve,” Joyce thanks him with a nod, which Steve returns, once the kids have quieted and each thrown Steve a glare that he knows he’ll have to cash in for later, whether he likes it or not.

“Now,” Hopper continues, hands on his hips and his head bowed to glare at the lot. “What are you doing here?”

“El is going to look for the Upside Down,” says Mike without preamble, pointing at El.

_“Mike,”_ El whines in exasperation, and Mike just looks around like he had no idea what he’d done wrong.

Hopper shakes his head. “Absolutely not. No one is going to sleep and going to the Upside Down tonight.”

“Not tonight,” Will corrects, and all eyes turn on him. He ducks his head, just a little. “And not while sleeping.”

“Secret spy,” El declares, then turns and grabs the small radio off of one of the kitchen counters.

Hopper just looks at her.

“Are you sure it’s not too soon?” Joyce asks her gently, her hands out in front of her like she meant to take the radio.

El moves the radio away. “I have to. The Mind Flayer might attack again, we can’t waste time.”

Joyce’s mouth pops open. Max looks at Lucas, who shakes his head in ignorance.

“I thought it was just Demo—”

“—gorgans,” several people finish for Hopper before he can even try, and he narrows his eyes at them all.

“Whatever the damn thing is. Why is the Mind Flayer suddenly a pawn in this?”

El’s eyes flash to Steve, who feels suddenly ill equipped to deal with this when Max in particular cocks her head in question. He didn’t want to be the one to bring up Billy—especially not if he was the Mind Flayer, and especially not if it meant it wasn’t really him.

“Uh,” he tries, looking to the ceiling so he didn’t have to look at any of them. “I may have seen something while I was Walking the other night?”

No one responds to that at first. Then, Alexei mutters something, looking between the three kids that could Walk, and Hopper turns and tells him something haltingly in Russian.

They all stare at him.

“You can speak Russian now?” Joyce asks, and something about the question sounds distinctly accusatory.

Hopper blinks at her, offended. “You try staying in a facility that barely speaks English for months and see if you don’t pick up _something_.”

Joyce looks annoyed, but Steve doesn’t bother deciphering that.

“Okay,” he says, to get the conversation moving, “what did he say, then?”

“He thinks it’s worth a try,” Robin chimes in, and Steve boggles at her.

_“You_ can speak Russian?”

“A little,” she admits with a shrug. “Spend a lot of time in that little dictionary when we were cracking our cipher.”

She winks at Dustin, and Dustin grins. “You are so awesome,” he tells her admiringly.

“I know.”

“Okay, yeah, she’s wonderful, whatever,” Steve rushes on, and Dustin throws him an offended look while Robin rolls her eyes. “So are we saying we’re going to go through with this whole radio thing?”

Joyce worries her lip, looks at Hopper. Hopper looks back, a stricken expression deepening the lines of his too-thin face.

“I don’t approve of this,” he declares, and everyone breaks to get things ready.

* * *

They sit in a relative huddle in front of where El sits against the far wall where Joyce had once torn the plaster away looking for Will. They throw on the radio, and El ties a bandanna over her eyes.

And they all go silent, waiting.

It seems like it takes a long time, but Steve thinks his concept of time has been skewed slightly thanks to his recent problems and his lack of sleep following his most recent nightmare. It’s not just him, though, because when he dares a look around, everyone is slumping where they sit, looking worn and tired and ready to take a nap. Then, suddenly, she starts to murmur, and it’s like everyone around her comes back to life.

“What’s she saying?” Dustin asks, trying to lean in.

“I can’t—hear her,” Mike says, frowning and trying to press his ear close. “I don’t know what she’s saying.”

“It doesn’t sound like English,” Max says, frowning from El’s other side.

“Something's wrong,” Will says suddenly, frantically, his hand on the back of his neck. And then, like her strings had been cut, El crumples to the floor.

“EL!” Mike yells, but is too slow to action, and Lucas is the one to keep El’s head from connecting with the table in front of her.

“Is she okay?” Max asks, right behind Lucas, taking El’s hands, and then her face, ripping the bandanna off. “She’s not breathing!”

“Move!” Hopper hollers, trying to push the kids aside, Joyce worming her way over faster than he can and grabbing El in her arms. The moment Joyce touches her, she comes to again with a choking gasp, heaving in air like she’d been drowning, her eyes snapping open wildly and focusing on nothing. Blood starts to drip from her nose, slow and sluggish.

“There’s—something wrong,” she gasps, clutching onto Joyce’s arms. “A block. Like, a force-field or something. It doesn’t— It doesn’t want me to come in.”

Hopper peers into her face from where he looms above, looking like he couldn’t understand what he was hearing.

“... But we’ve been able to get in while sleeping,” Will says slowly. “How can it be stopping you now?”

Dustin snaps his fingers. “Different powers. She’s using the wrong powers!”

Steve looks at Will, then Jonathan. Jonathan looks back, shaken.

They all look at El. She closes her eyes and swallows, just once, and when she opens her eyes again, they’re filled with fire. She looks at Alexei, and Alexei frowns at her, then nods once.

He says something then, in Russian, then stops and shakes his head before simply saying, “Walk.”

Steve goes cold, right down to his bones. The forest flashes in his mind, along with the trees, the dust, the Demogorgan and the human who might now be anything but. He didn’t want to go back, but he didn’t think he was being given a choice. Even if they all didn’t Walk, he couldn’t just let the kids go in his stead.

He feels Nancy take his hand, then Jonathan take his other. It grounds him, a little, but it doesn’t do anything to make him feel better.

“When?” he chokes out, and he absolutely hates how he sounds nothing like himself when he does.

Alexei shakes his head, just once. “Tonight.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sooooooo expect a title change at some point since I’ve fallen off the cart and I’m now very loosely following the Whumptober prompts, and I probably shouldn’t just be calling it “Whumptober 2019” anymore. 
> 
> (If you have any suggestions, feel free to drop ‘em. I SUCK at titles and will probably wander aimlessly until something manifests … much like this fic.)


	20. trembling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some of these are getting so long I'm having trouble writing them in a single day.
> 
> How do people DO THIS.

Steve had assumed the Walking was random, as the kids had also admitted they had no way to tell when it would happen, and Alexei agrees as much when the argument against them going at all comes up first in the form of Joyce informing Will he was, under no circumstance, going back to the place that had taken him from her not all that long ago.

“You’re not going back there,” Joyce says firmly once they all had calmed down from El’s mishap and Alexei’s declaration.

Will makes a face. “We can’t really control it,” he explains. “It just happens.”

“Yeah,” Steve agrees, shivering dramatically. “If I’d had a choice, I would have stopped at my first visit, thanks.”

Joyce turns to frown at Alexei once learning this, and he nods enthusiastically at the information, declaring it in so many words as correct.

“But you said they’re going to have to go tonight,” Joyce argues, sounding stumped. “How can that happen if they can’t control when they go?”

“Ah!” Alexei exclaims, holding up a finger. “Force,” he says slowly, like he’s talking to a child. “I force.”

He smiles encouragingly. They all look at each other like they were suddenly very sure he’d lost a few screws.

Robin, still technically grounded (which she decidedly informs everything that she will not tell her parents where she’ll be, and will sneak out of her house after pretending to go to bed that night, much to Joyce’s general chagrin), pipes up, “He’s got something he overheard on that baby, from what I’m getting out of his mindless muttering.” She points at the discarded radio, sitting on the floor next to where El had collapsed. Then, she points at a small leather-bound book placed over Alexei’s paper, which Steve is pretty sure belonged to Alexei in the first place. “He knows how to induce it.”

Alexei makes a face at her, saying something rapidly in Russian.

Robin just shakes her head. “No idea what you’re spouting, dude. You gotta go slow if you want me picking up what you’re putting down.”

Steve turns his sanity-questioning look onto Robin. “He learned how to send people into the Upside Down from a radio?”

“He’s been intercepting transmissions,” Dustin tacks on, reminding Steve he was even there and hadn’t followed everyone else into Will’s old bedroom to watch over El as she recovered.

Robin nods. “I saw him fiddling with the guts, must have done something to it to pick it up.”

“Like Cerebro, but small and possibly in code,” Dustin agrees. “A new cipher, I bet.”

“I hate when everyone’s suddenly so fucking smart,” Steve gripes, mostly to himself, as he throws his hands up. “I can’t follow when you start talking technical shit.”

Dustin sighs. “He thinks he knows how to put you back,” he says shortly, tapping a finger on the book. “I bet it’s all in here, but I can’t read anything it says.”

Alexei purses his lips and shakes his head, bringing everyone’s attention onto him. He points to the radio, holds the motion, then shakes the finger like he was making sure they were looking. “Door.”

“Door,” Dustin repeats, and the room goes quiet. He looks up, confused. “Door?”

Alexei nods, then turns the finger onto Steve. Steve tries not to look affronted, but he knows he doesn’t pull it off. “Cold. _Sleep.”_

Silence. Steve interrupts his by shaking his head. “Yeah, I don’t know what he’s saying.”

“I think,” starts Robin slowly, her head tilted as she squinted at Alexei, “he’s saying he learned about the door from the radio, not how to put you guys under.”

Alexei nods rapidly. “Yes, yes.”

Robin points to the radio as if testing a theory. "Sleep?"

"No," Alexei corrects firmly. "Door. No Sleep."

Dustin’s eyes grow wide. He jerks his head to look at Steve, his mouth popping open. “Oh my god, they only know about the door to the Upside Down,” he says in awe. “The Russians _don’t know_ _you can Walk.”_

* * *

The idea of Steve, El, and Will being some sort of secret weapon against whatever the hell the Russians are up to now manifests from Dustin’s epiphany, and something about the excitement it sparks in him and Alexei makes Steve suddenly feel sick.

He wouldn’t lie to himself and say he didn’t enjoy being the one that might be able to save them all, like a hero come at last, but he couldn't say it didn’t also scare the absolute shit out of him. He wasn’t a hero, not really. He was a normal guy who wanted normal things that kept getting wrapped up in things far bigger than him, just because he’d gotten too attached to the ones who also couldn’t seem to keep their metaphorical foot on solid ground.

He’s pacing back and forth in the small living room, his hands in his hair, while Joyce absconds to check on the group where El’s resting. Lucas and Max emerge and declare they’re going to run out and grab lunch for everyone—though, with what money, Steve doesn’t dare ask—and Joyce follows behind them a few minutes later, shutting the door behind her.

“They’re having a talk,” she informs everyone gently, but with an undertone that dared any of them to interrupt and face her might should they try. When no one challengers her (and why would they?), she crosses her arms and turns to Alexei, who’s turning the faucet on and off to no avail.

“Alexei,” she calls him in that way she had when she really sounded like she was calling a rabbit or some other timid animal, and Alexei looks up with his eyebrows raised. “We need to start getting ready for tonight. You need to tell us how we’re going to do any of this.”

She doesn’t mention again how she’s going to let Will go over her dead body, but she doesn’t need to. Steve figured out a while ago that he was likely going to have to do it alone, and he doesn’t necessarily want that rubbed in his face, anyway.

Sometimes, he really hated being the adult in a group of children, almost as much as he hated what they meant to him, and that he would have done it anyway even if no one had objected to them going in the first place.

Alexei makes some vague gestures with his hands, his face scrunching up with frustration as his mouth works. Finally, his eyes light up, and he says, far too enthusiastically, “I will cold kill!”

And Steve just stares at him.

“Did the Russian just say he was going to kill you?” Robin says slowly.

“I think that’s the language barrier,” Joyce offers quickly, then mutters, “I sure hope it’s the language barrier.”

Alexei’s expression drops. His hands flutter again, like moving them would help him figure out English better. “I, erm. Put with ice?”

“You’re going to ice them!” Dustin says from the couch, snapping his fingers, and Alexei nods rapidly. Dustin turns and nods his head resolutely. “Totally going to kill you.”

Alexei makes a noise of frustration, dropping back into Russian to mutter angrily.

“Where’s Murray when you freaking need him,” Joyce groans quietly, then vanishes from the living room.

“Where _is_ this Murray guy?” Steve asks, loudly, his hands out in front of him. “He’s the bald one, right? Where did he go?”

“That’s what Hopper has been trying to figure out,” Robin says from where she’s settled on the couch next to Dustin, deciding she needs to further scrutinize the paper Alexei has been writing on for the past few hours. Steve had glanced at it at once point, but it was all numbers and formulas and schematics labelled in that weird alphabet Russians used, and he couldn’t make heads or tails of, so he didn’t. The book, too, had been gibberish to him, and he didn’t waste any time with that, either.

Joyce reemerges from one of the rooms with a small book in her hands, which she tosses at Robin the moment she’s back in the living room. “You have the ear,” she tells Robin as Robin deftly catches the book, which Steve realizes is the Russian-English dictionary. “Help Alexei get his ideas out.”

“On it,” Robin quips, and then flips the book open and returns to scrutinizing the the schematic.

While Robin throws herself into translation mode, Alexei goes to the small fridge and pulls open the freezer, taking out the only thing that would really fit, the ice tray, and then pushing it shut it with a little more force than Steve really thinks is necessary.

“Is he always this angry?” Steve asks quietly, leaning over without taking his eyes off of Alexei, who’s stomping over to the bathroom.

“I think he’s just frustrated,” Joyce replies. “He’s having trouble communicating, and we’re not very good at figuring out his clues.”

“It’s not our fault we can’t compete with a Russian super scientist,” Steve grumbles. Robin throws a pencil at his head and his him square on the ear.

“Speak for yourself,” she says while Steve tries to regain his balance after overreacting.

Steve nearly does, but Alexei bursting from the bathroom again stops him short.

“Water,” Alexei barks, though Steve takes a second to comprehend, because the accent keeps tripping him up.

“The water’s shut off, Alexei,” Joyce says quickly, hustling up to his side and putting a hand on his shoulder.

“I know, I know.” Alexei shakes his head, and he looks a little mollified when he looks at her again. _“Get.”_

“He wants us to go buy water,” Robin concludes, her nose buried in the little Russian dictionary.

Just then, Nancy appears by Steve’s side and takes his hand, Will and Jonathan emerging from the room where Hopper, El, and the rest of the party were. It’s then he realizes his hands, previously shoved into the pockets of his jeans, had been shaking, something he’d pushed away in favor of the task at hand. And it’s not until Jonathan frowns and takes too-fast steps over to Steve’s and Nancy’s sides that he realizes, no, it wasn’t just his hands.

He was freaking out.

“I’ll go get the water,” he says hurriedly, and Robin’s head snaps to attention. She starts to stand, but Alexei calls something to her in Russian, and she looks briefly distraught.

“Whatever that face is about, stop it,” Steve orders, pointing at Robin. Joyce, who had gone to Will to ask about something—probably how El was with everyone crowding her in the room, which Joyce had specifically told them not to do—blinks at Steve curiously, and yeah, he’s gotta go. He wasn’t here to be mothered, and he didn’t need to be worrying Joyce when she had plenty else to be worrying about.

He could handle this. The shakes were just … something. Something totally chemical, like body chemistry shit. Not anything to be worried about. It was just happening, it was just a thing that happened. It was _fine._

He needs to _go._

He releases his hand from Nancy’s and grabs his keys off the counter, holding them up as if using them to ward off the expression growing on Joyce’s face. “I’ll be back!” he exclaims hurriedly, then nearly runs out the front door.

He drops into his car, and only has a few beats of silence to himself to get over whatever was happening to him when two of his car doors open, and Nancy and Jonathan drop into vacant seats.

“I can get some water!” he cries a little hysterically, almost angry he wasn’t getting a second to just not have an audience while he had a minor break down. “I am an adult, despite what everyone might seem to think otherwise!”

“You were shaking, Steve,” Nancy asserts. Jonathan frowns at her for a moment before turning the frown onto him. Steve doesn’t have time to remove his hands from the steering wheel before it became an obvious move, and they tremble against it defiantly.

Dammit. His body fucking hated him, he swears.

“I’m a little freaked out, alright?” he relents, referring to look at either of them. He swallows. “You don’t know what it was like down there.”

Both of them go suddenly still, only their eyes moving to share a look Steve doesn’t understand the meaning behind.

“Actually,” Nancy corrects softly, but only after Steve’s had too much of their silence and dared to look at them both face-on.

He blinks, then reels back, confused. “What? When?”

“When Will and Barb went missing,” Jonathan tells him, so quiet Steve nearly has to lean in to hear.

Steve stares, his mouth open but refusing to connect with the part of his brain that usually worked in overdrive without processing what came out.

“It’s okay to be scared of that place, Steve,” says Nancy. “It’s terrifying down there.”

Steve snaps his jaw shut with a click, suddenly feeling ridiculous over his own emotions.

He was _Steve Harrington_, for fuck’s sake. He wasn’t the one who lived with the demons of what had been done to him, and yet, here he was, falling down a pit triggered by an event he certainly had already gone through in some form before. He didn’t like the change. It felt—wrong.

The turmoil must be clear on some part of his face, because he feels hands covering his own on the steering wheel, and then one curling over his shoulder, and the sudden urge to throw himself at them, to hug them and kiss—kiss who, kiss which, kiss Nancy, kiss—nearly overtakes him. But he doesn’t act on it. Now wasn’t the time, and he was emotionally compromised.

“We gotta do what we gotta do,” he says, because he feels like he has to say something before he ruins their relationship with his mouth, and his voice cracks on the last word.

“You don’t have to do this,” Jonathan tells him, but he’s using his lying voice, and they all know it.

“Yeah,” Steve corrects solemnly. “I do.”

* * *

They get the water together, nearly silently, just so Steve can have time to himself to calm the fuck down before facing the kids, and Joyce, again.

Alexei frowns at the gallon jug of water in Jonathan’s hands when they return. Shaking his head, he takes it.

“More,” he tells them, then turns and starts for the bathroom. When no one follows, he stops and beckons them with a frantic flapping of his hand.

“I don’t like where this is going,” says Dustin as they all cram into the bathroom, facing the tub, where the dislodged ice cubes from the tray sat, melting sad little puddles on the porcelain.

Alexei unceremoniously opens the water and pours it all in.

It sloshes against the side, making everyone stumble away and into each other to keep from getting wet. Alexei drops the empty plastic jug to the side once he’s done and gestures to the tub firmly. _“Cold.”_

“Oh,” Will says softly, and Steve instinctively swallows on reflex.

“What?” Jonathan asks, and Steve can hear how tight his throat is with anxiety as he looks between Will and the tub. “Oh, what, Will?”

Steve stares at the ice cubes as they bob in the shallow water of the tub, and he doesn’t have to hear Will to somehow know what he was going to say next.

“He’s going to drop our temperatures,” Will says quietly. “He’s going to force the Mind Flayer to pull us in.”


	21. laced drink

No one has to say anything when it comes to Steve being the one to go. There’s only one bathtub, and everyone knows he’d been the only option from the start, anyway, because El had already tried, and Will was a _child_, and his default status is only exemplified by the fact no one—barring both Will and El, which he immediately tells to shut up when they say anything remotely close to it, and Jonathan and Nancy in the car, which was a comforting lie anyway—tells him he doesn’t have to go. Not a single person, not even Joyce. And that’s how Steve knows it was only ever going to be him.

He’s regalled to Jonathan’s old room when it gets close to nightfall, the rest of the day having been spent going through plans (Steve was to get in, try to locate the door, avoid the Demogorgan and the Mind Flayer if possible, and get out), eating lunch brought back by Lucas and Max way later than it should have been (“Princess over here couldn’t decide what side he wanted.” “It was chilli cheese fry day AND firecracker tater tot day, okay? That only happens in my dreams!” “And he ended up getting both.” “I ended up getting both.”), and then more planning where they basically relay the same thing over again like he didn’t take basketball throughout high school and couldn’t remember a damn game plan (he doesn’t mention Billy still, despite knowing he was pretty likely to run into both him and the Demogorgan, considering he was two-for-two on that front), and then finally allowed to be free while Joyce went to get all of the ice and Robin left to pretend to go to bed and sneak back out again.

Nancy and Jonathan join him, and Nancy hands him a cup filled with vanilla milkshake and a generous amount of Vicks NyQuil, meant to knock him out cold and keep him from waking up before he was ready to.

He thinks about the fact he didn’t actually know how to get out as he knocks back the disgusting concoction of vanilla and a bastard cousin of mint (_seriously, they need to flavor this shit,_ he thinks when he nearly hurls it right back up), because Will was the one who had done it last time, and he didn’t exactly want to throw himself down a ravine to wake up like he had the first.

Jonathan pats him on the back when he does gag, and Nancy takes the cup and leaves the room with it while Steve swallows it all down.

“I don’t see how this is going to work,” Nancy mutters when she returns, slightly bitter, as she drops on the floor with the Russian-English dictionary splayed in her lap. “We’re knocking you out and getting you cold enough that your heart rate could possibly render you comatose, and they think the Mind Flayer will just _take_ you?”

Steve shrugs, worming out of his shirt, the weird sleep mixture churning sickeningly in his stomach as his nerves start up again.

“It’s supposed to be like El does,” Jonathan says, taking Steve’s shirt and folding it despite Steve never asking him to. “I guess static isn’t enough when you don’t actually have powers, though.”

“Maybe it won’t work,” Steve tries. “Maybe I’ll fall asleep and wake up unable to have children in addition to not seeing shit.”

“I just don’t get why the Mind Flayer would want you,” Nancy continues as if neither of them have spoken and, yeah, she’s definitely bitter this time. Steve tries not to wince. Nancy still didn’t know about the Mind Flayer-Billy theory, and he didn’t really think he had the balls to even try to bring that up right now. If he could confirm Billy was really there, like El and Will seemed to be dubious about, then maybe he’d bring it up.

“Thanks, Nancy,” Steve replies dryly instead, his fingers working on his belt. “We all know I’m turning more and more undesirable with each passing moment, you don’t need to pile it on.”

Nancy looks up at that, a smile quirking to her lips, but she’s not looking at Steve—she’s looking at Jonathan.

Steve frowns and turns, catching Jonathan just as a blush is starting to crawl up his neck.

Now, Steve might not have the highest IQ in the room by any means, but he’s no stranger to love. Or lust. Or whatever the fuck has been happening between him and Jonathan while he was busy realizing he never fell out of love with Nancy.

He knows what he _knows_—and he knows that color high on Jonathan’s cheeks is no coincidence.

And he fumbles, just for a second.

“Are you—” he starts, only for Jonathan to hold up his hand and stop him in his tracks.

“Nope, not now. Now is not the time.”

Steve blinks, thinking he should probably be affronted. “I mean, it might be now or never. I could die, couldn’t I? Or at least get wrecked somehow.”

“What?” Nancy says sharply, jumping to her feet. “No, you’re sleeping. You’re not actually going to be there.”

“Does that make me safe?” Steve asks, but it’s not a question that can be answered, and he knows it.

Nancy looks anguished, turning her eyes from Steve, to Jonathan, and back again. “Steve,” she whispers.

Steve shakes his head. “Nance, come on. Who else is going to do it? We have to find that door to close it before the Russians get to it and make everything worse, right? They’ve already got Demogorgans—if they get the Mind Flayer, we’re _fucked.”_

Nancy purses her lips, looking like she wants to take everything Steve just said and run it through a woodchipper, then set it on fire, just for good measure.

Steve turns, flapping his folded belt at Jonathan. “And you, we’re talking about this when I wake up, okay? Jesus, I’ve nearly died too many times for whatever is happening here,” he waves the belt some more, and Jonathan makes a face, “to be the thing that freaks me out the most, alright? You guys mean a shitload to me, okay? Like, so much shit I could be reincarnated as a pig and be the happiest I could ever possibly be for the rest of _that_ life.”

Nancy snorts, but Jonathan doesn’t look even a little amused. He steps forward and grabs Steve’s head, pulling it down until he can press his mouth against the side of Steve’s temple.

Steve’s mind goes utterly blank, but he finds it calms him more than anything, and he hadn’t just been bullshitting his way through that just to make Jonathan feel better about whatever he was going through.

Jonathan pulls away and nods, just once. Steve blinks a few times before nodding back, and then Jonathan leaves the room.

Steve looks at Nancy. Nancy looks back.

“So, that’s—” he starts, only to be stopped by Nancy stepping forward and pressing a hand to his bare chest.

“Remember what we said that night,” she tells him gently, “and we’ll talk when you wake up. And you had _better_ wake up, Steve Harrington.”

Steve hesitates, swallows, and then exhales a long breath and nods.

“Wouldn’t dare do anything else.”

* * *

They fill the tub to the brim with more ice than water, and Steve can feel his gonads curling up into his stomach just looking at the thing. He really, really doesn’t want to do this.

Joyce’s hands are on his shoulders, then his arms, rubbing heat in that he won’t be able to keep. Will and El are huddled by the side, the only ones in addition to Robin and Alexei allowed in the small, cramped space, and only because Robin was the best bet at understanding Alexei should something go wrong.

She looks at Steve with her round eyes, blue and worried in a way he knows she won’t speak, and he can only look back at her, her face blurring just slightly as the sleep concoction kicked in.

“Remember,” she whispers, just before Steve starts to step in. “We’re turning you into a Mind Flayer lure, but you’ll still be asleep. You won’t actually be there.”

“Right,” he says, sounding way more sure of himself than he feels. “I’ll be fine, stop worrying so much, jesus.”

Robin cracks a smile. It’s small, and it’s nearly watery, but it’s something.

Steve turns away and steps in.

Immediately, it’s a kind of burning he thinks he’s never felt before in his life. It’s almost so cold, it’s hot, and it gnaws with needles of sparking pain around his right foot and ankle the moment he plunges it in. He almost screams, but it’s so cold, his voice comes out as a small whine mixed with a sharp gasp.

“Easy,” Joyce murmurs gently. She’s still holding Steve as he eases in, he realizes. He’d been so shocked by the cold that he hadn’t felt her move in.

With Joyce’s hands holding him steady, Steve lifts his left leg and sets it in with the first, and immediately knows that something is wrong.

Instead of the biting, hellish cold that sends his bones aching like the first time, this time his leg flares up like he’d been set on fire. It burns, but it burns hot, searing, bolts of lightning starting from his ankle and zapping up his side instead of lashing needles of ice scraping along his skin. He nearly falls, from the pain or the shock or the drug he doesn’t know, and he can’t think past the blinding white fog of it all to care.

He hears someone yell his name, he can’t tell who, or if it had been more than one person, and he stumbles down into the cold bath so quickly his mind is rendered white.

More yelling, someone trying to pull him out, hands on him on his shoulders on his waist on his face, but he can’t really feel them. He’s falling under, and all he can hear is someone he knows—someone he doesn’t like, someone who is _dead_—calling his name.

When he opens his eyes, he’s lying on the ground, with someone crouching over him.

He sees blurs of blue and black and burnished gold, backdropped by a pulsing shade of red, and he almost feels relieved when he knows where he is.

Billy looks down at Steve, tilting his head. When he smiles, it’s rueful, and it sends a shiver down Steve’s spine as it comes into sharp focus.

“Next time, pretty boy,” Billy drawls, patting Steve on the cheek with the tips of his fingers, “just call for me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NyQuil used to only be mint in 1986 right
> 
> ... I feel like that's right.


	22. hallucinations

“You’re alive,” is the first thing Steve gasps out, like the absolute moron he is. Why, he couldn’t tell you, beyond the fact his brain was so far behind his mouth that he somehow managed to forget that he didn’t know if this was really Billy, or if he was vividly hallucinating each time Billy appeared in front of him while he traversed the Upside Down.

Never mind the fact he clearly could touch Billy, as was evident by the tapping Billy’s fingers still did against Steve’s cheek as he tried to pull it together, blinking blearily and running his tongue along his teeth like the action could reset his brain.

Billy’s mouth turns into a frown, a wrinkle appearing between his brows. His forehead is creased with the dark dirt that made up parts of the forest floor around them, and Steve thinks, idly and completely inappropriately, that there must not be any showers in the Upside Down.

Billy watches Steve for a moment, his eyes searching as Steve tried to get his bearings, the after effects of the NyQuil apparently transcending into whatever state he was in while he did this. Then, he sighs, almost gently, and gingerly pulls Steve to his feet. It’s so different from how Billy had ever handled him before that Steve goes along with it without flinching or questioning it until he’s already standing and staring Billy in the face.

“You’re not going to attack me?” Steve asks, bewildered and delayed.

Billy snorts. “I’m not the bad guy anymore, genius.”

Steve tries his darndest to mull that over, his head sluggish and his thoughts fading in and out before he can really complete them. He doesn’t notice even Billy walking away until he’s a good six feet in the distance, and Steve barks a noise of surprise and jolts into motion to follow him, only stumbling slightly when his bare foot hits wrong. He realizes in that exact moment that he’s wearing the same thing he’d gone under in—which is to say, literally nothing.

Great. He was never falling asleep naked ever again, that’s one thing for sure.

“Wait, wait, stop,” he hurriedly urges, one arm crossed over his torso like that would help anything, reaching out and grabbing Billy’s shoulder. Billy stops immediately, looking down at Steve’s hand like it was something disgusting. Steve doesn’t remove it. “I’m here for a reason,” he explains quickly.

Billy looks up curiously. “To find out what I am?”

“What? No—I mean, well, yeah, that would be cool too,” Steve amends, rushing through his words, “but not really. We’re looking for the door.”

“The door,” Billy repeats flatly. Steve can’t tell if he understands or not, so he just nods. Billy only raises his eyebrows in turn.

“The door to get here?” Steve tries, realizing he didn’t actually know the terminology for what he was looking for, because everyone assumed he’d be searching on his own. “Y’know. Without being dead to the world.” Steve hesitates, realizing too late his wording, and sheepishly corrects. “Uh, I mean, asleep.”

Billy looks stumped for a moment, his expression somehow managing to question Steve’s sanity while also taking place in, uh, the _Upside Down_, but then his face smooths out and his mouth pops open, just for a second, with surprise. “I know what you’re talking about,” he says faintly, then unceremoniously grabs Steve’s shoulder and wheels him around. “Follow me.”

“Not giving me much of a choice,” Steve grumbles.

“Stay quiet,” Billy orders, ignoring Steve. “You don’t belong here and they know it.”

Steve opens his mouth to ask who “they” are, but is stopped abruptly by Billy’s nails digging into the skin of his shoulder, where his hand still held firm. He makes an aborted noise of pain, but it’s barely more than the ghost of a whimper, and Billy lets it slide.

They walk quietly from there for what feels like a mile or so, with Steve stumbling along, shoe-less and with his arms wrapped tight around his torso to ward off the strange chill that permeated the air around him, wishing he’d thought to ask to wear all his clothes into the ice bath. Billy strides confidently beside him, keeping Steve from falling on his face each time the threat appears, looking too comfortable in his grungy jeans and scratched leather jacket. They’d probably make it farther in silence if Steve could stand being quiet for that long, but he thinks hanging around with hyperactive children has damaged him more than he’d like to admit, because, after that mile or so in, he starts talking again despite Billy’s warning.

“You sure you know where you’re going?”

Billy snorts. “You’re walking on my turf here, King. I know this place better than the bones under my skin.”

Steve thinks that’s a pretty weird way of putting it, but Billy’s always been kind of a weird guy.

(Okay, really weird. But weird in a different way. Now he was just … creepy.)

“I guess you have been here a while,” Steve amends quietly.

Billy’s face scrunches up then and he, surprisingly, looks sad. “This is all I have now. They killed that thing that tried to be me up there and took me here and made me this.” He stops abruptly, making Steve nearly trip on a root when he hurries to follow, and gestures down at himself with his open palms, pulling his arms wide. “I don’t think I’m even human anymore.”

Steve hesitates. “So that thing that was attacking Hawkins…?”

“Was trying to be me,” he concludes with a nod of affirmation. “I guess it technically _was_ me, just not the me that belonged up there.”

Well, that makes even less sense. Steve’s head, already hurting, starts to ache with a pulsing need to stop receiving information. “How does that even work?”

“You ever hear about doppelgangers?”

Steve shrugs, the term not sounding particularly familiar, though he thinks maybe he’d heard it in a movie before.

Billy rolls his eyes. “Jesus, Harrington. You ever pick up a book, or do they just keep your bed steady while you screw your future away?”

Steve bristles. “Hey, I’ve read a book before! And I don’t do that shit, for fuck’s sake. I was in demand in school, but I wasn’t a damn playboy, alright?” He grinds his teeth, adding, at a grumble, “I never would have gotten Nancy to date me if I was.”

“Did you or did you not bag at least three, four girls before Wheeler took your ass in?”

Steve hesitates, realizing his mistake. “Oh, fuck off.”

He’d forgotten about that. What had seemed so important (and, frankly, was the high point of his douchebaggery, if he was being honest) back when his social standing in school was all that mattered was now fading in his mind in favor of what had happened after. With each step he took away from who he had been before Nancy—and _Jonathan_—had changed him, he lost a little of what had occurred during that time.

He thinks maybe that should scare him more than it does, because while he would forget, he knows the ones he hurt wouldn’t.

“That’s what I thought.” Billy laughs, but it’s bitter, coated in an acid that burns in the back of Steve’s throat. “A doppleganger is basically like a body double, to put it in your simple terms. At some point, I got one, and when I started getting attacked, I started changing. I saw the thing the first time I was dragged into the steel works, but I didn’t know what the hell was going on until I was already dead.” He cocked an eyebrow at Steve. “Tell me if you can’t keep up.”

Steve throws him a one-finger wave. “Just keep fucking talking, Hargrove, Jesus.”

Billy flashes his teeth. “I became him, he became me. Possession is some weird shit. When you guys killed the big bad, it was on me to end it. And I did, and the rest of me went here. Que sera, sera.”

Okay, now Steve’s lost. “Was that supposed to make sense?”

Billy shakes his head ruefully, his lips curling into a waspish smile. “You think anything down here makes sense? Even jacked up on this power, I don’t get shit about what’s happened to me or why I’m stuck here. I just _am.”_

Steve purses his lips. “You’re, what, tied to this place now?”

“I _am_ this place,” Billy corrects, and Steve is pretty sure that confirms the whole Mind Flayer theory, which is just _fantastic_. Now he was going to have to tell Max her brother not only pseudo-died, but he was now the ruler of what was basically the underworld while also being the thing that tried to kill them for three years straight. “There’s never been a way out.”

“The door,” Steve says, snapping his fingers. “What if you came through the door? After we find it?”

But, to Steve’s surprise, Billy hesitates. “Harrington,” he starts softly, and his eyes aren’t meeting Steve’s. “I never belonged up there,” he continues after a beat. “I don’t even know what kind of shit would happen to me if I got out and people learned about what I was. I don’t have a home there any more than I do here.”

And, for the first time, Steve hates the world he’d come from because of what it did to someone he didn’t even like.

“Your dad’s gone,” Steve blurts. “He’s in rehab somewhere. Max and her mom have the house now.”

Billy looks up, shock plastered across his face. “What?”

“He’s—”

“No, I know what you said and what you mean,” Billy cuts in angrily, but, Steve thinks, not at him. At the situation, at what it’s done to him. Steve finds he can easily relate, maybe a little too much. “You’re fucking telling me that assbag finally checked himself in and I was already dead to him?”

Steve purses his lips shut before he can tell Billy he’s pretty sure his death, and what it had done to Neil, was the turning point for Neil going to get help. Neil was a lot of things, but worthy of being backed up was not one of them. So Steve shuts the hell up, just for that instance, and Billy starts walking again, Steve following behind his angry silence.

After what feels like forever and a day, where Steve nearly breaks the silence again just to help him ignore all the creepy sounds that have started trilling in his ear at random intervals, they reach an old, crumbling building, and when Steve looks up at it, he can’t believe his ridiculously shitty luck.

“You have got to be kidding me,” he groans, the delipidated 7-Eleven sign staring him in the face from where it hung haphazardly by a wire from the storefront.

Billy cocks his head questioningly, but Steve waves him off, muttering to himself about how stupid the universe liked to be sometimes. Billy lets it go, and Steve’s pretty sure he didn’t really care in the first place.

He lifts his hand and points, straight through the store. “Four or five miles that way, straight North. Don’t waver, and you’ll find the anomaly.”

“Anomaly?” Steve repeats.

“I didn’t know what it was, I just felt it when it happened. Like a ripping feeling.” He shrugs. “I don’t really get this shit, alright? If you say it’s a door, then it’s a door. All I know is it’s a screwy hole that feels weird. It’s how I lost the monster.”

Steve jerks back. “Wait, the poisoned Demogorgan _did_ come from here? What about the one you attacked?”

Billy shakes his head. “Not from here. That one came in the hole, not out.”

“Great,” Steve breathes, looking at the 7-Eleven again, and then pauses. “Thanks … for saving my skin back there, by the way.”

Billy laughs, the sound coarse and scratchy, breaking with disuse like he hadn’t done it in a long while. “You don’t deserve to die in this stupid place, Harrington. They need you up there.”

And, Jesus. Steve is _so_ not equipped for this.

He pauses, wishing he had pants on so he could shove his hands somewhere, because now he felt nine levels of awkward with what he wanted to say before he had to figure out how to leave. “They miss you, you know.”

Billy tilts his head, looking at Steve at an angle. “No they don’t,” he says firmly, and Steve hesitates.

“Max does,” he corrects, and that seems to shut Billy up, because he only looks away, his mouth pressing thin and bloodless white. Steve shifts, having nowhere to go, and he waits.

“Steve?” a voice calls faintly through the quiet that fills the space, the same voice he’d heard the first time he’d been to the Upside Down, before Billy had shown his face.

Steve _knows_ that voice.

He looks at Billy, but Billy’s looking at the ground as if he hadn’t heard anything.

“Steve Harrington?”

“Uh,” Steve starts, causing Billy’s gaze to snap back to him. “Hello?” he tries, turning away. Billy frowns and follows.

“It _is_ you,” the voice says, and a figure appears.

Steve about swallows his tongue when he recognizes her. She was dressed in the same outfit he’d last seen her in, before she went missing, and she was just as grimy as Billy was.

Barb.

_“You’re_ alive?” Steve squacks. Billy’s head snaps to look at Steve again, but Steve doesn’t catch the way a dangerous glint of calm has seeped into Billy’s eyes, otherwise he probably would have stopped. Instead, he takes a step towards Barb. “Are you a doppelganger, too?”

“Harrington,” Billy warns, and Steve finally hesitates. Barb watches him, her head cocked, a bemused expression on her face. “You need to leave. You’ve been here too long.”

“But Barb’s—”

“That’s not what you think it is,” Billy grinds out, grabbing Steve’s shoulder hard enough to bruise and yanking him back. “Don’t look at it.”

Before Steve can say another word, Billy’s hands snap out to smack against Steve’s chest, and Steve falls to the ground with a hard jolt, his vision going black.

He wakes up with a choked gasp to find himself swathed in blankets, a number of faces hovering above him, all looking worried and sleep-deprived.

“Oh, thank god,” Nancy says first in a rush of a breath.

Joyce pushes in, pressing her hand to his forehead, his cheek, carding her fingers through his hair. “Steve,” she calls quickly as she goes. “Steve, hey. Can you hear us? Are you feeling alright? Can you—”

“I found it,” Steve croaks, cutting her off, and everyone snaps back to attention from where they’d started bustling around anxiously. Only Alexei has kept his gaze on Steve without moving, and it’s Alexei Steve chooses to focus on, his heart hammering in his chest as he realizes what he’s accomplished.

“You— You found it?” Joyce repeats, a little startled, and then looks over at Hopper, who’s standing stoically next to Alexei.

Steve nods, the movement jerky. “I know where the door is.”


	23. bleeding out

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're closing in on the home stretch, lads.
> 
> (thank god bc I'm burning out fast hoo boy this was harder than anticipated)

They don’t waste any time getting everything into motion.

As soon as Steve is considered awake enough to function and is no longer shivering hard enough for his teeth to audibly clack together, he’s asked to get dressed and get ready to lead them to the gate. He doesn’t ask why they don’t wait for morning, because he knows time is precious, and waiting could mean letting things fall into Russian favor. If they found their Demogorgan again—if they found the Upside Down, with Billy in it—then it was all over, El’s returned powers or not.

They all suit up as fast as they can with weapons, flashlights, bandannas to tie over their faces just in case— everything they think they might need should the portal not be closable like the others had been before.

Granted, there’s a crater-sized hole of room for mistakes, and Steve has no doubt they will make a few, but they don’t have much of a choice. It’s now or never, and they all pile into two different cars the moment they’re out the door, one with Joyce at the wheel and the other with Jonathan, destination: 7-Eleven.

* * *

It looks pretty much the same as it had when Steve and the others had escaped from it—shut down, a little worn, totally empty—but it still looks leagues better than the one in the Upside Down. They park in the woods about a quarter mile from it and pile out of the vehicles, a somber quiet to the group as a whole once they’ve gathered, and, together, they all start their trek with Steve leading the way.

They hear the whimpering first.

It’s about four and a half miles due North from the 7-Eleven, as Billy had dictated, when they hear it, and Steve’s not even sure he’s not hearing things at first, not until he glances at Nancy to see her glancing back.

They hear the whimpering first, and then they notice the puddles of blood trailing in the exact direction they’re going in. Joyce tries to keep the kids behind her, Hopper, and Alexei as they all creep forward, on high alert for whatever they might find. It doesn’t work great when more than half of them are now taller than her, and they were never great at listening anyway since hitting puberty, but it’s better than them running on ahead and getting themselves into some potentially deep shit like Steve, Nancy, Jonathan, and Robin are doing, leading the pack with their weapons held tight.

“The gate is close,” El whispers, breaking the frankly-terrifying whimper-filled silence, and that’s when they see the body.

Steve’s not sure whose flashlight hits it first, but as soon as it’s spotted, they’re all spotlighting their light onto it, and with a sickening lurch in his stomach, Steve realizes they’re still alive.

The body turns, just a little, towards the light, and it’s a man, dark-haired and covered in blood, wearing a shredded lab coat that Steve thinks was once white, a Russian flag plastered on his dirty shoulder.

He gurgles something softly, blood spilling from his lips, and everyone jumps to attention like they’d been asleep until that moment.

Alexei yells in alarm, rushing forward with the group and talking rapidly, then breaking from them and crouching down, his hands hovering out from where he curled over the dying man.

_“Monstr,”_ the man gurgles, his accent thick, then says something Steve can’t decipher and abruptly stops moving. Blood bubbles from his lips, but it’s clear he’s stopped breathing.

Ahead, Robin creeps forward, her flashlight moving back and forth, and she stops abruptly a few yards in.

“Steve?” she calls quietly, her voice ringing too clearly through the suddenly-silent air.

Steve winds around the group surrounding him and carefully avoids the dead body, Joyce, and Alexei, making his careful way to where Robin was shining her flashlight, and there, _there_ is the gate.

Like a pulsing slash, nestled in trees that look as if hosting it was eating them alive, the door is there, and Steve’s ankle starts to throb as if in reaction to it.

Nancy and Jonathan come up behind him, and Steve hears Nancy’s small gasp when they realize what they’re seeing.

“Is that … blood?” Nancy whispers, and Steve looks to where she’s shining her flashlight.

On to the trees that frame the portal is blood, splattered at around Steve’s height and sprayed up the trunk.

“Oh, shit,” Jonathan whispers, boggling at the blood.

“We should have waited for sunrise,” Robin says, just as quiet.

And then, the monster screams.

Nancy rounds first, her shotgun up and firing before Steve’s even managed to locate which direction the beast is coming in, his ears rendering to a ring when she lets loose three shots. The Demogorgan is too far away for all her shots to hit, but one definitely does, because the thing is _howling_ like it’d been shot, a dark spot blooming somewhere on its torso, and there’s a rotten taste to the air that hadn’t been there just before.

More shots are fired from all the ones carrying guns—Alexei, Jonathan, Joyce, and Hopper—in varying intervals, a cacophony of world-shattering noises that makes Steve desperately wish they had thought to bring some sort of ear plugs. Lucas and Dustin are screaming, frantically shoving unidentifiable things fished out of their backpacks into their weird sci-fi-looking guns with the help of Mike and Will, while Max flicks a lighter to life with a harried yelp of triumph. Steve readies himself with the bat, watching as the disgusting thing creeps closer, faster and faster despite the bullets bursting its blood vessels and tearing holes into its being, and, beside him, Robin starts breathing heavily, her hands clutched firmly around some weird charged taser thing Dustin had cooked up.

(“It’s nowhere near as cool as the one we found underground,” he admits when he shoves it into Robin’s hands. “But it’s got the charge of six police-grade tasers on it, so I think that’s pretty damn close.”

“Where the hell did you get police-grade tasers?” Hopper asks incredulously, staring down at the thing.

“I know a guy,” Dustin answers cryptically, and Hopper just looks at Joyce with an offended kind of horror, like this had been happening right under his nose as Police Chief.)

El’s the only one who doesn’t move once her hands are out in front of her. She stands slightly to the side of the chaos her friends are making, just behind the wall of adults, all with different guns, angled in such a way that Steve could easily see her out of his peripherals from over Robin’s head.

He doesn’t know what she’s doing, but the monster is now far too close for him to spare the thought at figuring it out.

Despite the rain of fire, the monster gets close enough to lunge, and they all start screaming when it drifts to the side and goes right for Jonathan. Steve nails it in the head with his bat in the same moment Robin lashes out with her stun rod, and it screeches and recoils away, blue lightning lacing up its maw, where Nancy sinks in yet another bullet, nearly point-blank. It’s not until something barrels into it that the monster is dislodged enough to free Jonathan, knocking it back a few feet and then exploding with a boom that rattles Steve’s bones.

_This one isn’t sick enough,_ Steve realizes when it doesn’t explode into pieces like the other one, the one from Murray’s place, had.

“Holy shit!” he hears from somewhere in the back, but he can’t tell who it is.

“Jonathan!” Steve shouts as Nancy readies to shoot again.

“I’m okay!” Jonathan rasps out, clutching desperately at his shotgun, pressed against his chest. Steve holds his hand out to help him up, and Jonathan’s hand trembles in his as he pulls. “I’m okay,” Jonathan says again, pressing his shotgun back against his cheek, when Steve dangers one more look at him before turning and throwing himself back into the fray.

The thing is relentless. They’ve backed it up a good couple yards with their onslaught, but it still tries to push forward again, the bullets and electricity and exploding-whatever from Dustin and Lucas doing little to keep it grounded for more than a few moments.

Then, the air shifts.

El starts to scream. Not the terrified, frantic screaming they’d all been doing when the Demogorgan showed up—this is a scream of exertion, of force, of energy that is so palpable, Steve can feel it filtering through the air. His leg starts to burn, the white-hot ache he was now almost too familiar with zipping up the entire length of his left side.

And the monster rips apart.

One moment, it’s there, covered in bullet holes and smoking like it had been cooked alive—the next, it’s shredding limb by limb, screaming a horrible sound of agony as its meat is ripped clean from its bones—or, whatever constituted as bones, for whatever kind of creature it really was. Its howl mixes sharply with that of El’s, a bellow of pain against one of absolute power. It’s the worst thing Steve’s ever heard, and, in that moment, also the best.

It’s the sound of victory, and he falls to his knees when the pain in his leg becomes too much, just as the monster’s cry is silenced, abruptly and completely, by its demise.

El collapses again, and the adults and kids all run to her, yelling unintelligible things in varying tones of worry, success, and distress, but Steve can’t stop staring at the bloody mound of gore, a marker of the creature that once was.

And he relaxes, just a little. Because, at least, this part was done. The Demogorgan was gone.

Now all they had to do was close the gate.


	24. secret injury

They take a moment to calm down from the excitement of El tearing the Demogorgan to shreds, but not much of one. Steve uses it to try his best to stand back up on an ankle that no longer seems to want to support his weight with the help of Jonathan and Robin, who hold him upright once it’s clear it’s just not going to work. Jonathan struggles for a moment, but then he’s got Steve firmly on his shoulder and seems to hold him easily enough, so Steve doesn’t question it.

El’s still conscious, thank God, but she’s pale, with dark circles staining the skin beneath her eyes. She looks terrible, and Steve kind of wishes they could just wrap up and leave it.

Nancy, still not a mind-reader as far as Steve was aware, says, “We can’t wait for it to heal itself, can we?” and Steve cranes his head to look at her. She’s standing by the door with her arms crossed, and when she looks up from it, her expression is one Steve has always hated to see. She looks exhausted, worried, and ready for this all to be over. Which, all of them were, but Steve thought it always looked the worst on Nancy. He didn’t like how it made him feel.

Jonathan shakes his head, no one but the four of them having heard her, apparently, if the fact that no one jumps to answer in his stead is any indication.

“That thing’s been around long enough for a Demogorgan to get out,” he explains, and Steve doesn’t bother correcting him with knowledge he learned from Billy and forgot to tell. “And it still looks big enough not to heal anytime soon. We can’t wait, not when there are Russians already out for it.” He turns his head slightly without really looking anywhere, and Steve knows he’s thinking of the dead man they’d just found. Steve wonders why there was just a single man out, but knows he doesn’t have the time, or the intuition, to really puzzle it out, so he doesn’t.

Nancy looks down, and Steve turns his gaze to El. She was sitting up, nodding her head at something Joyce was saying to her, with a red streak of blood smeared along her cheek from where she must have wiped it away carelessly. As if she felt Steve staring at her, she looks up and meets Steve’s eyes, and he doesn’t look away. Her gaze hardens.

“Okay,” she says, loud enough for him to hear, and then she starts to stand up.

No one stops her, though Joyce looks like she’s nearly physically restraining herself from doing so, and El slowly pulls herself to her feet, swaying slightly once she’s made it. Max and Mike hold her elbows, but she waves them off, and then makes her way to the door.

Jonathan, Steve, and Robin move out of her way as she passes, watching her move to the very front of the portal, close her eyes, and lift her hands.

They wait. And nothing happens.

Her fingers start to tremble with exertion, her face scrunching up, and still, nothing happens.

She drops her hands.

“The gate won’t close.” El turns and frowns. “Something is blocking it, I think.”

And Steve’s heart immediately sinks.

Billy.

Everyone else erupts into chatter as they try to figure out why this particular portal won’t close, but Steve only stares at it, trying to think of how he can get around this without outright explaining the whole Billy thing, which he really thought wasn’t necessary to the narrative at this point, when they were so close to just being done with it.

And then he realizes, maybe he just needs to go in. Maybe he can find Billy, talk to him about it, and then come back out and make something up.

Yeah. Maybe that would work.

“Hey,” he calls quietly, gaining Robin’s and Jonathan’s attention. “Let me go, I’m good.”

Robin frowns. “You sure about that?”

“Yeah, yeah. I have to do something.”

Both of them hesitate, but then slowly let him go, and Steve wills his ankle to cooperate as they free him from their grasp. Thankfully, it does. Mostly.

Jonathan stumbles as he backs away from Steve, catching himself on a tree.

“Jonathan?” Nancy questions anxiously, but Jonathan stands up and waves her off.

“Tree root,” he mumbles, his cheeks red.

“Don’t knock yourself out just yet,” Steve warns as he half-limps towards the open portal. “I might need you guys to yank me out.”

Abruptly, the clearing goes silent. All eyes turn to Steve, though how they possibly could have heard _that,_ when they hadn’t heard anything else, is beyond him.

“Yank you out,” Nancy repeats slowly, and immediately after her Hopper says, so firmly Steve thinks there’s not meant to be room for argument, “Absolutely not.”

Steve’s already a few feet away from the portal. It stands a head or two shorter than Steve is tall, but he knows he can easily throw himself into it if he needs to. Nancy, close enough to grab him if he doesn’t act fast, watches him warily. El, who had moved to Hopper’s side as if to stop him should he also lunge for Steve and stop him, watches Steve carefully.

“I’ll go with,” El says calmly, ignoring Hopper’s declaration.

“No,” Steve insists. “You need to start closing it from this side while I figure out what the hell is happening on that side.”

El frowns. Nancy holds out her hand. “Wait a minute. What if you get stuck?”

“I think I’ll know how long I have to get out.” He points down to his ankle, which still stings with the aftermath of El’s attempt. “I can feel it when she goes full-throttle. I’ll use that to gauge when I need to high-tail it out.”

Will pushes to the front, his expression confused. “Wait, you can feel it, too?”

“Mind Flayer?” El tries, and Will opens his mouth again, only to be cut off by Hopper.

“Uuuh, was it doing that before?” he asks loudly, warily, and Steve glances down at the portal to find it pulsing.

“Uh,” he tries, and Robin finishes with, “No, definitely not.”

Steve steps forward and grabs the trees, staring down into the door as it rhythmically pulsed red.

“Is it healing?” Jonathan asks.

“No,” someone behind Steve—Dustin—says in awe. “It’s getting bigger.”

And Dustin was right. The edges of the trees were tearing, ripping themselves at the seams as the portal pulsed and grew wider and wider. Steve backs away quickly, stumbling when his ankle gave out, and just narrowly misses getting nailed by a body being spewed from the portal.

_“GET THE FUCK OUT!”_ a voice roars suddenly, and then the portal _rips._ Like a wound being torn wide, the opening gaped open, and Steve, Nancy, and Robin throw themselves out of the way as another body catapults through the opening, landing in a heap on top of the first. They were both clad in all black, but that’s all Steve could discern before his attention is being wrenched back to the portal, now so wide it could perfectly frame the figure standing in the middle of it.

Billy, with his chest heaving and his face and neck, the only exposed skin he had under his outfit, spidered with thick, black veins, stood there like a nightmare come to life. His eyes were dark hollows around red pupils, centered on Steve where he lay on the forest floor, and they pulsed red and black in time with the edges of the portal around him.

Max gives a strangled cry, effectively breaking the tension. _“Billy?”_ she calls frantically, struggling to pull from the crowd of others around her. Billy’s eyes snap in her direction, and, slowly, the veins start to fade from his face, returning his eyes to their bloodshot blue. Jonathan jumps forward and grabs her, grunting with the effort of keeping her from going in, and she clutches at him desperately without ever taking her eyes off her brother.

“Stop!” she cries, struggling against Jonathan. _“Stop!_ Billy, is that really you?”

Billy winces, and the action is possibly more human than anything else Steve has ever seen him do, even before he became the Mind Flayer. “Max,” he replies quietly, and his voice echoes through the portal.

“Let me go, Jonathan!” Max growls, but Jonathan only holds her tighter, his face contorted.

Billy shakes his head, just once. “Stay out there, Maxine,” he orders, his voice hard and amplified. Max stops struggling, hurt written across her face.

“But …” she starts, but doesn’t continue, her eyes still staring squarely at Billy through the light of the gate.

“This is where I belong now,” Billy says when Max doesn’t say anything more. “I can’t come back. You weren’t supposed to see me, but those bastards” —he nodded at the heap of humans that he’d apparently just propelled out from the Upside Down— “needed to be seen out.” He pauses, his gaze drifting back to Max. “Harrington will explain,” he starts again, and Steve thinks, _Oh, thanks for that,_ when he was never asked in the first place, “but I have to stay. Don’t come looking for me,” he orders, his voice hard again. “If you do, you won’t be able to get back out. So don’t.”

That’s a lie, as far as Steve is aware, but it makes Max’s jaw clench tight, and Steve realizes that might have been exactly what Max was calculating before Billy called her out on it.

El steps forward, interrupting the conversation. She eyes the portal warily, then points a hand back at the two bodies. “We have to close,” she declares. “Now.”

Billy stares at her. Max’s mouth parts around a word she doesn’t say, her expression twisted into agony. She’d said goodbye, Steve knows. And now she’ll have to do it again.

“How the hell do you expect me to do it?” Billy asks El. “I used up half my damn energy getting those two chucklefucks out of here.”

“You help,” El explains, then turns to look at Steve, and then Will. “You help, too.”

Nancy looks at Steve, bewildered, her wide eyes asking more questions than Steve thinks he’ll ever be able to answer.

When no one does anything, El sighs, dramatic in such a way that only a teenager could really manage. “Mind Flayer,” is all she says by way of explanation, and, yeah, Steve still doesn’t get it. He seems to be the only one who doesn’t, though, because not only does Billy nod his affirmation, but so does Will, and then he walks over to El’s side and places a hand on her shoulder. They all look at Steve, and Steve blinks back. It takes Robin reaching over and pushing Steve to get him into motion, and he glares back at her as he limps his way to El’s side and copies Will hesitantly.

“Ready?” El asks, and Billy and Will say “yes” in the same moment Steve says “no.”

El raises her arms, Billy follows, and then the fire starts.

He feels it first like a small pinprick of heat among the sore ache his ankle had devolved to, something easily ignored while he stands there, his hand on El’s shoulder, and waits awkwardly when nothing immediately presents itself as something he can help with. Then, out of seemingly nowhere, his entire leg catches aflame.

Not with real fire, but it might as well be from the sudden lick of heat that slashes up from where it was born, and Steve gasps and nearly doubles over. Will, from El’s other side, makes a choked noise, his hand flashing to grab at the back of his neck, and Steve realizes El is _using_ them. And then, just after that, his whole body starts to burn.

He can’t help the scream that slips from his lips, starting small and painful before building to a yell that evenly matched the ones coming from El, Will, and Billy. The air cackles with the energy between them, heated by the fire that raged from Steve’s effort, and slowly, then all at once, the portal closes, and Billy is gone.

* * *

Steve has to be helped to his feet and half-dragged the nearly-five miles it takes to get back to the car after he’s picked up from the pile he, El, and Will had all collapsed into the moment the door had been closed completely, overcome immediately by harried friends and family members trying to make sure they were okay. The sun had started to rise once they’d figured out what to do with the dead scientist Russian and the two unconscious black-clad ones, of which Hopper said he’d come back and take care of after tying them to a tree, likely with Alexei in tow, and it’s firmly in the sky by the time Steve’s being manhandled into the car by Dustin and Lucas, whom he’d been so unceremoniously handed over to once Robin had declared herself exhausted after helping to get him there in the first place.

It’s not until Steve’s settled into his seat with Jonathan by his side that he notices the side of Jonathan’s shirt is soaking wet.

And then he notices the gash.

_“Jonathan,”_ he hisses, grabbing Jonathan’s shoulder, and Jonathan jolts to attention. His face is pale—too pale, Steve now realizes—and he looks like absolute shit. “Mind telling me when the fuck you got that?”

Jonathan looks down, and, somehow, seems to whiten a few more shades at the sight of the blood soaking his shirt and the torn remnants of what was once a side, previously hidden by the cover of his jacket. “The— The Demogorgan,” he whispers back.

“And you didn’t _say_ anything?”

Jonathan winces. “I didn’t think it was that bad.”

Steve starts to spit back that obviously it was, but he doesn’t get a chance to say anything at all, because Jonathan interrupts him by making a small noise, followed by a gasp, and then faints, right into Steve’s lap.


	25. humiliation

“Oh my god,” Steve starts immediately, voice rising with each passing word, the panic setting in quick. He grabs Jonathan’s shoulders, then his face, and tries to check to see if Jonathan was even conscious. If he was even _breathing_. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, _oh my god!”_

“Steve!” Nancy exclaimes, stooping down to yell at him through the open door, her mouth curled around whatever she’d been about to chastise him with, and then she sees Jonathan, and her entire face goes white.

She pulls back out quickly and nearly screams, “Mrs. Byers!”

Joyce is there in a flash. “What happened?” she cries, ducking in for just a second, then pushes away from the car and runs around to the other side, faster than Steve’s ever seen her move. She wrenches the door open and slides in, pulling Jonathan around until he lay with his head nestled right in Steve’s lap, face up, with his torso splayed out on the seat and his wound fully on display where his jacket fell away. “Oh my god!”

“He said it was the Demogorgan,” Steve explains quickly, if only to keep himself from repeating her like he’d been on a loop just before.

Nancy’s face snaps to Steve. “He didn’t say anything before?!”

“Obviously not!”

“We have to get him to the hospital,” Joyce says, the remains of Jonathan’s shirt lifted up in her fist as she inspects the wound. She drops the shirt again and gingerly gets out of the car, wiping her blood-stained hand on her jeans and shutting the door. She moves out of Steve’s line of view, but he can hear her call, “Hop! Hop, Jonathan was hurt! I’m taking him to the hospital!”

That only gets Will to freak out, and, before Steve can even see him coming, the door on Jonathan’s side flies back open again and the kid slides into the seat, his expression frantic.

“When did he even get hurt?!” asks Will, his distress making his voice crack over every third word. He looks up at Steve with wide, pleading eyes, then turns them on Nancy as she throws herself into the passenger seat.

“Demogorgan,” Steve replies shortly, a little breathlessly, then clutches for Jonathan in time with Will as Joyce guns the engine and peels out onto the road, heading for the emergency room as fast as she can.

* * *

They rush him to the hospital, and the same nurse that had checked over Steve when he’d been attacked by the Demogorgan is apparently the one to check over Jonathan before getting him stitched up, because Jonathan complains later on, once he’s situated in a bed at the Motel 6, that he’d had to scramble to find a reasonable means for his attack when his friend had gotten attacked not even a week before, and he’d ended up looking like _that_ idiot that goes back out thinking he won’t get attacked by the same thing, and then ultimately does.

“At least she didn’t look at you like an inept parent for letting her son go out and get mauled after bringing in a different kid for the same thing,” Joyce tells him surprisingly good-naturedly, ruffling his hair before leaving him, Nancy, and Steve alone for the adjacent room she stayed in.

He’s lucky he doesn’t need any blood transfusions—he’d apparently fainted from shock and aggravation to the wound, according to the doctor who looks him over, though Steve finds that just a little dubious considering Jonathan was the one to cut open El’s leg back when the mall fiasco was happening. He’s saddled with a bunch of stitches, a few sutures, some medicine, and a lot of gauze, then given the option of staying longer just in case, which he swiftly refuses, must to Joyce’s general displeasure.

All in all, Jonathan gets out of the mess alive but in pain, with yet another wound to match the one still healing on his leg, and a sour attitude that comes off him in waves even after his mom’s left the room.

“Hey,” Steve tries once the door shuts behind Joyce, reaching out and jostling Jonathan’s shoulder. “What’s wrong with you? You got off with a flesh wound, that’s a pretty good deal.”

Jonathan, his head bowed down, doesn’t offer Steve a response, and Steve looks over at Nancy with his brow furrowed in question.

“Hey, man, come on,” Steve tries again, but this time Jonathan shoulders him off and turns his head away. Jonathan’s hands clench, fisting into the blanket that covers him, and his cheeks burn pink from above the clench of his jaw.

“I’m tired of being the weak one,” Joanthan says, his voice low, and Steve immediately looks over at Nancy again in bewilderment, because when was Jonathan _ever_ the weak one? “You and Nancy just—attacked the thing, no fear.”

Steve stared at Jonathan. “I’m pretty sure I was screaming,” he corrects shortly. “Wasn’t I screaming?” he asks Nancy, turning to face her.

She nods. “He was screaming.”

“See?” Steve turns back to Jonathan again, his eyebrows raised high. “I was definitely screaming.”

Jonathan doesn’t seem soothed by this. “Yeah, but you still attacked that thing like you weren’t afraid of it.”

“You attacked it, too,” Steve points out. “My ears are still ringing from all you guys ‘attacking’ it with your guns and explosives.”

Jonathan laughs bitterly and says, “But when it jumped me, I just froze. I didn’t do anything, I just let it attack me.”

Steve laughs in return, but it’s more of a startled noise than an actual action of humor. “Are you forgetting the time I was, uh, _dragged across the fucking junkyard by my leg?” _He looks back at Nancy, waving his hand like he expected her to add onto that, but she just looks at him and shakes her head like she doesn’t know what he wants from her. He sighs, returning to face Jonathan again. “Okay, well, if you can’t remember. I didn’t do shit. I was too busy being scared for my life and my leg.”

Jonthan’s lips purse, and they disappear from his face completely with the action, making some strange, familiar thought about them ping through Steve’s mind like he’s had thoughts about them before. Weird.

“But I passed out. It was still humiliating,” Jonathan admits quietly, to the point where Steve almost doesn’t hear him while he’s busy wondering why he was thinking so intently about Jonathan’s mouth.

Nancy looks at Steve. Steve looks back.

“I passed out,” Steve reminds him a little too urgently. “Blacked the heck out multiple times, actually.”

It doesn’t seem to soothe Jonathan though, and Steve can see the tendons in his jaw clenching tight.

“Jonathan,” Nancy starts gently, but Jonathan cuts her off.

“Nancy, I don’t want one of your Nancy Wheeler consoling talks right now, alright?”

Nancy reels back, blinking, and Steve almost intervenes until he sees her face harden, and then he backs the fuck up. Because he knows that look, and he does _not _want to get in the way of what comes next.

“Oh, but when it’s your Jonathan Byers pep talks, it’s perfectly fine to butt your head in and make commentary?” she hisses.

Steve looks between the two of them, unsure of what a “Jonathan Byers pep talk” was and feeling like he was missing something crucial to this argument. Nancy’s halfway to her feet from her space on the bed, and her eyes are narrowed and waiting for Jonathan’s retort. Jonathan sits there, not looking at her, and then he surprises them both by laughing a throaty, husky laugh.

It’s such a_ Jonathan_ laugh that that’s all Steve can focus on for a moment, while Nancy reels back a second time, half-offended and half-caught off guard by the sudden reaction.

Nancy splutters a moment, then asks indignantly, “Is this _funny?”_

“Sorry,” Jonathan apologizes between laughs, but doesn’t actually stop laughing. “Sorry, yeah, it kind of is. This is all so stupid.”

Nancy glares at him, but it only lasts for a few more of his laughs before she deflates completely and looks at Steve like “Do you see what I have to deal with?” Steve just looks back, confused and a little uncomfortable, and hopes he isn’t making any faces that could constitute as a response to the apparent silent conversation he’s being pulled into, because he was terrible at those, and he never knew how to say what he wanted to say without saying something else by accident.

You know. If that makes sense. Steve’s not totally sure it does, but he’s only in his own head, so it’s not like it matters that much. A lot of things happening in Steve’s head didn’t make sense to him. It isn’t new territory.

Jonathan stops laughing abruptly, curling in on himself. “Ow,” he moans quietly, but he’s still got a smile plastered to his face. “Laughing hurts.”

Steve reaches a hand out like he can help at all, and Nancy sits back down with a sigh.

“Your feelings aren’t stupid, Jonathan,” she tells him without seeming concered about his self-induced pain.

Jonathan sobers up, still curled over himself. His eyes flash up to meet Steve’s from beneath his lashes, and Steve reflexively swallows. He nods, maybe a little too enthusiastically at first, because he agrees with Nancy, but he suddenly doesn’t know how to make his tongue work right to get the words out and just say it.

Jonathan looks away. Steve finds he can speak again, and he does, “You know we don’t think that shit. We’ve all faced down too many of those creeps for any of us to think anyone was weak.” He reaches out and grasps Jonathan’s shoulder, shaking it firmly and getting Jonathan to look up again. “It’s all in your head, man.”

Jonathan meets his eyes again, his face scrunched into one of unhappiness, and Steve doesn’t look away. He holds Jonathan’s gaze, trying his best to convey how serious he was in his statement, and, after a beat, Jonathan nods once, twice, a few times more, like the idea is settling in and he’s allowing himself to accept it.

“Okay,” he mutters. Nancy reaches out, curling her hand around his bicep, and he tilts his head to look at her. “Okay. You’re right. I was just—”

“Don’t say ‘being stupid,’” Nancy warns.

Jonathan shuts his mouth, clamming up completely, waits a heartbeat or two, and then starts laughing again. This time, they join him, and Jonathan seems to relax away from his worry slowly but surely.

Still giggling, Nancy leans in and presses a kiss to Jonathan’s cheek, and Steve doesn’t miss a beat when he witnesses it, which tells him so much more than he was prepared to be told right in that second, not even a full twenty-four hours after he’d been dunked in freezing cold water and forced to face the man of his nightmares (well, _some _of his nightmares, but it still counted). He’s entirely comfortable with Nancy showing Jonathan affection right in front of him, and if that doesn’t mean he’s completely over her—and he knows he’s not—then what did it mean?

God, Steve did not have the brain power to puzzle any of that out right in that second, and whatever brain matter he had working overtime in that second shorts right out when Nancy pivots at the waist and leans towards him, then presses a kiss on the corner of his mouth.

He freezes completely, the laugh his tongue had been curled around dying a quick death in the cavern of his mouth.

His eyes immediately snap to Jonathan, horror building in his gut, but Jonathan only watches him with a small smile, and, needless to say, Steve has now lost any comprehension of the situation at hand.

He stutters, stumbles, and stops before he can get a coherent word out, then swallows loud enough to shatter glass, the gulp almost painful. “But I thought you—” he starts, eyeing Jonathan for any signs of what was happening, only for Jonathan to huff a snort of a giggle, likely at Steve’s physical and mental scrambling.

They’re promptly interrupted by Joyce opening the door again, and Steve gapes at her unflatteringly as he fails to recover from whatever the hell just happened.

“You okay, Steve?” Joyce asks him hesitantly when she spots him staring at her with his mouth open, seemingly warring between remembering Steve wasn’t that much older than her children and thinking he had a few screws loose.

“I—uh, yeah, yes, I’m—” He coughs into his hand awkwardly, then has to clear his throat when it makes him need to actually cough. “I’m good,” he croaks. “So good.”

Joyce doesn’t look convinced, but she thankfully drops it. “Right. Well, Hopper just called. The two guys we tied to the tree? They were gone when he and Alexei went back.”

Steve blinks, startled. When he looks at Nancy and Jonathan, they look back, eyes wide.

“Gone?” Jonathan repeats.

Joyce nods. “We don’t know if they were picked up or they got loose themselves, but Hopper can’t find any trace of them.”

Nancy asks, “What are we going to do?”

Joyce shrugs tiredly, telling Steve just how much it all was getting to her.

“We’ll have to go back on red alert, I guess. No going out at night, keep an eye out for suspicious activity. Do not go back to the old house.” She looks at them all intently at that last one, and they can only give her a wince of a smile in return each. “Just, stay vigilant, I guess.”

She shrugs again, like there wasn’t much else that could be done. And, well, she’s right. What else could they do without getting the state involved?

“I’m so tired of all of this,” Jonathan grumbles. And, Jesus, Steve has never agreed to anything more.


	26. abandoned

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So my dumb ass thought a 24-hour readathon was a good idea when I didn't have anything of this chapter finished.
> 
> If you haven't figured it out yet from this fic alone, I have the foresight of a two-year-old.

Steve never gets a chance to talk to Nancy and Jonathan from there. Joyce doesn’t leave them alone while she hunts down where all the kids have run off to and makes Steve phone Robin and give her the low-down. Jonathan falls asleep not long after his mom’s started the rounds, anyway, and Steve doesn’t want to have the conversation with just Nancy when it involved more than her, so he doesn’t bother trying.

He’s sent home with a warning to be safe a few hours before the sun is scheduled to set for the night, and another warning not to leave the house after dark while Hopper was still hunting the Russians down.

All of the lights are noticeably off in the house when he pulls into the driveway. He doesn’t bother using the garage to store his car, instead leaving it parked in the middle of the driveway when it becomes clear what’s going on. When he steps into his front door, his steps echo hollowly throughout, and he easily confirms his earlier suspicion that the house was empty.

His parents left early.

He finds the note he’s expecting on a notepad next to the bowl they put their keys in, filled now with nothing but a spare house key and some loose change, and he unceremoniously clangs his own car keys into it as he picks up the note and reads, “Called in a few days early—big movement on the front! Leftovers are in the freezer, we’ll call you when we land!”

He scowls at the facade of kisses and hugs that trail the statement, the slashes of black ink that are almost as cold as the people who left them. He doesn’t know why it bothers him so much right in that moment—he was used to this. This was the norm for his parents, especially the older Steve got. They stopped bothering with babysitters and nannies the moment he turned fifteen, and it’s just been him ever since.

He doesn’t know why this time stings when so many others didn’t. Why this one bothered him when he’d been through this more times than he could comprehensively count.

It probably had something to do with the fact he wouldn’t have bothered coming home in the first place if he’d known it would be empty, or at least would have asked Robin to sneak out again at night to keep him company.

(Not asked Nancy and Jonathan to come over, though. Steve still isn’t totally sure what the hell is happening there, but he also is surprised it’s not bothering him as much as it might have if he hadn’t already been neck deep in monster bullshit, which has proven to vastly overshadow anything else happening in his life at any given time. Regardless, he wasn’t really mentally up to par right at the moment to handle whatever was coming next, plus Jonathan probably shouldn’t be out of bed for the next few days, and he didn’t think being left alone with Nancy would be any better.)

(He wasn’t going to go back, either. That would just be pathetic.)

Alas, he’s left alone and to his own devices, entirely unwillingly, and he slumps up the stairs to his bedroom to change after making sure the front door is locked behind him.

Dustin’s already radioing him by the time he makes it up to his room, and he can hear his tinny voice even through the closed door.

“Steve!” it crackles, Dustin’s voice five octaves too high to be any sort of comfortable for a living being to hear. “Steve, if you don’t answer the radio in five minutes, so help me—”

“I _just_ got home, dingbat,” Steve hisses into the thing once he’s basically thrown himself across his bed to get to it. “Where’s the fire?”

“Hopper still can’t find the Russians and he almost got recognized—”

“Shocker. The dude’s like six-foot-ten, how many people that tall do you see walking around in a small town like this?”

“I think he’s actually six-foot-three— Stop distracting me. He almost got recognized so he’s stuck in Will’s old house again until nightfall.”

“Okay,” Steve drawled slowly, flopping back and splaying out on his bed with the radio pressed to the side of his face. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“Uh, maybe make sure to watch yourself? They’re probably the same guys who kept you hostage, who knows where they’re stalking around right now.”

Steve scoffs. “I think I can handle a couple of Russians that got the shit kicked out of them.”

“By a guy with superpowers!” Dustin points out unnecessarily. “Which _you_ don’t have! At all!”

“Alright, alright,” Steve amends. “I’ll watch my back when I go out. You really think they’re going to be prowling Hawkins looking for us? They’re not exactly inconspicuous.”

“Big word, Steve. Good job.”

“Shut up, shitstack.”

“Look, I’m just relaying what the adults told me, okay? I don’t want Mrs. Byers hounding me about not contacting you if something happens before we can hunt the bastards down again.”

Steve rolls onto his stomach with a huff, switching the radio to his other side. “They might not even be here anymore now that the door is closed.”

“We can hope, I guess. _Someone_ let them go, though.”

“Are we done here? I’ve got a plate of frozen lasagna with my name on it chilling in the ice box, and the Walkie is making my ear hurt.”

Dustin sighs. “Just stay safe, dude.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Steve agrees, then cuts the radio and sets it down. He lies there for a few more minutes, face-down in his rumpled comforter, cold and unwelcoming thanks to the amount of time it had been since he’d last slept in it. His parents hadn’t even asked him to call as soon as possible and tell them where he’d been despite being gone for well over a day after being “missing” for three days not even a week before, and with an injury that they’d initially thrown a fit over once finding out about it. Steve thinks maybe that’s what growing up feels like, and then he thinks it’s not all that different from how it had been for the last five or so years of his life.

But this was his life, and, after facing the Demogorgan and evil Russians so many times in so few years, at this point he was just glad he still had one to live.

Amazing what the deadly supernatural can do for your will to live.

With a final sigh, Steve pulls himself out of his bed and moves on with his night as the sun starts to set just outside his window. He strips out of his grimy clothes, covered with splotches of Jonathan’s dried blood and embedded with dirt previously soaked in Demogorgan ichor, and takes the longest, hottest shower of his entire life. He stays in there until the water is ice-cold, and then has to practically throw himself back out of it when it sparks some kind of panic deep in his gut, reminding him that maybe he should take better care not to remind himself of terrors that hadn’t even had a full twenty-four hours to live out.

God, what was his life?

Stuck in a state from there of just moving on with the motions, he towels off, checks his radio just to make sure no one’s tried to reach him there instead of calling, tells himself he’s not disappointed when there’s no sign of any kind of attempt at contact, and then gets dressed and thumps down the stairs to heat himself up some dinner, just so he doesn’t find a bad excuse to call up Nancy or Jonathan or Robin or even Dustin after convincing them all he was going to be fine at home that night.

(Never mind they thought his parents were home, and likely thought that was comfort enough. They’d have no way of knowing his parents had ditched him without a word until they were already gone, not without one of them driving by and noticing his car was out front, the surefire sign he always used to show he was home alone, or Steve telling them directly, which he was not going to do. He was an adult. He was almost twenty. He could handle this. It was fine.)

He grabs a heaping plate of frozen lasagna and stuffs in it the microwave, punching in a number he knew by heart at this point to heat it up just how he liked it, and then sets his head down on the counter, nestled between his folded arms, and just listens to it whir. He doesn’t think about anything else, and that, frankly, is a relief right in that moment.

He’d visit the others in the morning, he tells himself once the microwave dings, telling him that his thoughtless moment was over with and it was time for his brain to kick back into motion, as slow of a motion as it might be. Hang out with Robin during her shift, like they used to do before the bullshit of the Demogorgan resurfaced. Or visit Jonathan and not help him with his homework in any sense of the word, because trying would just make it worse, and he didn’t want to be stressed out or stress anyone out, just for a single day.

Maybe he’ll talk with Nancy and Jonathan about that kiss—_kisses_, he realizes, because Jonathan had kissed his temple and he’d forgotten in the face of Nancy’s kiss and the horror ride he’d gone on in-between the two—and actually glean some information on the mess that was apparently manifesting between him, Nancy, and Jonathan, that didn’t bother him as much as he thinks it probably should.

_Yeah,_ he thinks as he pulls his dinner from the microwave’s depths, the plate strangely cold but the lasagna lump steaming with heat, _that’s what I’ll do. I’ll figure things out tomorrow, or the next day if I can’t. Something productive that doesn’t involve monsters or Russians or dead people that just couldn’t stay dead. That’ll be good._

He turns away from the microwave, only to find that there’s now a gun pointed at his face.

Oh. Huh. Well, okay. Guess Steve found the Russians.

So much for tomorrow. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so I KNOW that's a hell of a cliffhanger, but I MIGHT be late with tomorrow's depending on if I can get it written tonight or not, because I will be at Didney Worl tomorrow and doubt I'll have any time to write. Sorry! I love you :D


	27. ransom

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hah-ha! I did it. It's a hot mess, but what else is new?
> 
> It's also technically the 27th for me, so I'm posting it now. (Also, not proof-read. Excuse the mess!)

“Don’t. Move,” the guy in the black mask says slowly, accent thick, and Steve has to stop himself from stating he wasn’t even thinking about doing that in the first place. Which is a lie, but no one needs to know that.

He momentarily _does_ think about making a run for either his room or the front door, but then he notes the build on these guys, and how long it’s been since he’s had a good run after a career of scooping ice cream and pilfering out movie rentals, and deems either idea working totally unlikely and completely stupid.

Instead, he plays like a good little hostage and allows them to grab him and maneuver him where they pleased, only griping when they step on his bare foot with their thick-soled boots and nearly take one of his toes with them.

They strap him up with some of his dad’s leather belts, pilfered from a hefty supply somewhere in his parents’ room, and the hard, biting leather does a good job of cutting off the circulation to his hands almost the moment he’s trussed up like a true kidnapee. With a quick exchange in Russian once Steve’s deemed secure, they both turn and leave, pounding up the stairs to do whatever the hell it is Russian spies do after taking over a teenager’s house.

Steve thinks about maybe screaming his head off while he has the chance, but he knows, despite being set in the very middle of the entire house, with the front door perfectly in eyesight, that no one would hear him. It was a big house, but it was full of things that pretty effectively blocked noise from echoing around the high ceilings and spacious rooms. It was why he could get away with blasting music and throwing parties without getting the cops called on him. That, and the fact there was a pretty strict “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule amongst the more wealthy citizens of Hawkins, Indiana. Shit went down on the richer side of things, and if you didn’t see or hear anything—and you never did—then there was never a reason to be involved with the law.

In short: Steve was pretty fucked.

Steve tries the bonds of both his arms and legs, but they’re strong, he can tell by now numb his arms are already getting, and, short of chewing off his own arm or leg, he didn’t think he was going to be getting out of them on his own in this lifetime.

With a frustrated grunt, Steve snaps his head back against the wall, wincing when it connects harder than he means it to, and listens when one of the Russians shouts at him to be quiet.

Steve already knows what’s coming, so there’s no real point to being as afraid as he is, but his body doesn’t seem to understand that, because he can see his shoulders trembling—though whether that's from blood loss of legitimate fear, he doesn’t really know, but his racing heart is indication enough for the latter argument.

Steve knows what’s coming once the Russians tire of whatever it is they’re doing, and he knows all he can really do is wait and hope someone thinks to check on him despite the fact it’s getting later and later in the night, and everyone was probably fast asleep by now.

He knows all he can do is wait.

So he closes his eyes, and he waits.

* * *

The pounding of boots on stairs finally signals the return of the Russians some odd amount of time later, and memories flash behind Steve’s eyelids before he wrenches them open and glares at the men that come in. He never got a great look at the two while they’d tied up, so he can’t exactly say whether or not this is them, but they aren’t any more happy to be with him than he is them by the look in their eyes behind the masks on their faces, so he doesn’t think it really matters either way.

The one bearing the gun that had been shoved in his face earlier stands by the door, while the one without steps forward and grabs Steve’s shoulder, shoving him back against the wall hard enough to make his teeth rattle.

“Open the portal,” the man says in accented, but relatively clear, English.

Steve shakes his head like he heard him wrong, then squints up at the man. Was he crazy? “What?” he spits. “I can’t open those things. Seriously?”

The man scowls and knocks him against the wall again. It’s only slightly better than getting a fist to the stomach or face, but it _is_ better, and Steve really hopes these guys didn’t learn anything from the other Russians. “You closed it. Open it back up.”

Steve coughs, more for show than because he needs to, but it’s convincing enough to his ears. “Yeah, I know what I did, but you have the wrong guy. I can’t open it. I couldn’t even technically close it!”

The man looks back at the gun man and they have some sort of silent conversation Steve can’t interpret. Why was everyone so good at the silent conversation thing? Where did Steve go wrong to be so bad at it?

No-Gun Russian looks back. His black mask keeps Steve from seeing a lot of his expression, but Steve can tell he’s not happy. Why would he be? “Which one closed it?” he barks more than asks.

Steve laughs derisively, which gets him the punch he didn’t want, right in the gut. He chokes on the loss of air it takes from him, heaving forward on himself until No-Gun Russian forces him back against the wall and he has no choice but to gasp against it, his head tilted back like it would do anything for the air flow.

Jesus, you’d think he’d have learned the first time he’d gone through this. What the hell was wrong with him?

“That guy’s—gone,” Steve finally chokes out, his voice weak.

“Gone?” No-Gun repeats.

“In the Upside Down. He’s the one that kicked your asses to the curb.”

That doesn’t seem to be what he wants to hear, because he growls a noise that makes the hair on the back of Steve’s neck stick straight up, his only warning before No-Gun grabs Steve by the hair and knees him in the face. Steve hears more than feels the cartilage in his nose break, the pain only coming once he can’t breathe from the blood gushing from his nostrils. Why does it always have to be the face? His looks were all he really had, besides his hair. They were always ruining his second-best attribute, and they just _kept_ doing it.

If they ever shave his head—he can’t promise the things he’d do in return.

Steve groans, choking on the flood of blood pulsing down his face and the back of his throat, a disgusting tang of metal and salt. There are white bursts of light pinging off behind his eyelids in time with his heartbeat, and when he opens his eyes, there are black spots edging all around his vision.

“Liar,” No-Gun spits at him, his accent garbled beneath the sharp ringing in Steve’s ears. “You’re lying. Who can open the portals?”

_“I’m not lying,”_ he grounds out. Like the last time, he wasn’t _totally_ lying, because Billy did help close the portal, and Steve was, like, eighty-nine percent sure he could also open them, since he basically ruled over the entire realm now, and that seemed like a very Mind Flayer kind of thing to be able to do. Just because he’s never _seen_ it didn’t make it untrue. “The guy you want is in the Upside Down, and _that_ door is already closed.”

He’s braced for the next attack when it comes, an elbow to the back of his head, but he still nearly shears off his own tongue when he forgets to clench his teeth together in a moment where breathing became the top priority, and he no longer had the use of his nose. The black spots dance, turning red, turning white, and he really wishes people would let up on the head trauma. Robin was right—he didn’t have any brain cells to spare, and these fuckers just kept trying to diminish his already pitiful supply.

No-Gun turns to Gun and says something Steve can’t understand—either because it’s in Russian or because he really does have some bad damage building up in his cranium—and they both turn to him just as he’s lolling his head back against the wall to look at them.

“Tell us,” No-Gun says slowly, his voice churning gravel on asphalt, “or we tell.”

Steve doesn’t know what the hell that means, so all he does is offer them a dopey smile, making sure there’s enough blood coating his teeth to be extra gross before he says, “I told you, you dickstick. He’s in the Upside Down, and _you_” —he lolls his head the other direction, snorting when he overcompensates and almost falls over— “are _fucked_.”

No-Gun looks to Gun and nods, just the once, and Gun turns and takes the stairs two at a time as he ascends them to God knows where, while No-Gun stays behind and crouches before Steve, smiling a smile that, honestly, could use a generous amount of toothpaste slathered on it.

Gross.

“I think,” he starts gently, and that’s nearly scarier than anything else he’s done so far, “it is _you_, child, who is _fucked.”_

Steve swallows thickly despite himself. He keeps eye contact with the guy, noting the blue-ish gray of his eyes and the hint of the blond color of his eyebrows from beneath the black of his mask, and he waits for his next move.

They only stare at each other, though, for so long that Steve has to blink more than once, and he’s pretty sure the Russian does, too, but he must do it when Steve does it, because Steve never actually witnesses the action, and he thinks that’s meant to unnerve him even more. It works, because he jumps slightly at the sound of Gun thundering back down the stairwell, and No-Gun’s smile only widens like he’s won.

He pivots slightly on his feet without moving from the crouch in front of Steve and asks Gun a question in Russian, to which he only responds in a word Steve actually understands: _“Da.”_

Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.

That? Was not a good sign.

Steve opens his mouth to ask them what it is they’ve done, but he’s hindered by No-Gun shoving something into his mouth and nearly choking him with it. Steve splutters around the cloth-like object, and hopes to high heavens it’s not from the laundry pile, because he’s way overdue for getting some of that done.

“Five minutes,” No-Gun tells him firmly, and then stands up and walks away.

Steve has no idea what the fuck that means.

Both men disappear from sight, and Steve immediately gets to work trying to dislodge the fabric from his mouth.

It takes all of his mental effort to do so, and way more time than he would have liked to admit, but, eventually, he’s managed to tongue the thing to the back of his teeth and, with one final, firm thrust, spit the thing onto the floor with a wet plop in the exact same moment his doorbell rings.

His head snaps up, and, for the first time, fear takes over his entire face.

_No._

Gun goes to answer the door. Steve holds his breath, hoping it’s not back-up Russians ready to ruin all of Steve’s shit in one go.

“We got your message about the ransom—” Steve hears first, and his stomach drops when he realizes that’s _Jonathan’s_ voice. And, suddenly, he hates himself for wishing it wasn’t back-up, because anything would have been better than_ this._

Oh, fuck.

Oh, _fuck!_

The Russians had somehow called them under the guise of Steve—what, in need of something? Was he used as ransom? Was he the one _offering _ransom?! —and they had decided _Jonathan_ was a good candidate to bring along to whatever it was they’d made up for Steve to need?

_Really?_

“Who the hell are— Hey! Hands off!” That’s Robin, Steve knows immediately. And then, before he can think anything more, all three of them are right there, in front of him, with Gun pointing his gun at their backs. They look more shocked than Steve really thinks they have the right to, considering _they_ were supposed to be the smart ones.

Great. Great! They were all kidnapped, again!

_“Are you kidding me?”_ Steve screeches, just before No-Gun turns sharply and promptly knocks his lights out with one admittedly well-aimed punch. 

Shit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I took the whole "ransom" part a little vaguely, so this is more of a "gathering of what will be ransom" (IE the four kids) rather than a "already using ransom" kind of thing.


	28. beaten

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I lost the point a little bit regarding the prompts on this one, sorry about that! Too wrapped up in the plot at this point.

Steve comes to, and he comes to not only still unable to breathe thanks to his sinuses being clogged with congealed blood, but also with his head feeling like a melon on the verge of cracking open by its own volition.

Not fun feelings, especially not in combination.

He notices Nancy and Jonathan before he remembers what happened before he was knocked out, the both of them staring at him in silence with stricken faces like they weren’t sure what was going to happen to him next, and the whole predicament he’s in rushes back into his memory like the Hoover dam breaking open in his head.

Robin.

“Where’s Robin?!” Steve gasps, wrenching himself around to look despite the room being relatively open and very obviously absent of the girl in question.

Relief floods Nancy’s face. Why, Steve can’t seem to fathom, because it sure seemed like everything had gone right to shit, but he’s stopped from thinking on it or asking about Robin’s whereabouts again by the door to the room they’d been shoved into—the walk-in pantry, in the kitchen, if the size and Pop-Tarts on the shelf above Jonathan’s head were anything to go by—being thrown open and a bound Robin stumbling in, her arms behind her back, pushed on by one of the Russians.

She thumps down by Steve on the floor, twisting around immediately to bark something at the Russian in, well, Russian, her vocabulary apparently vast enough to say something Steve is pretty sure he’s never heard before, but must be an insult of some kind if the way the Russian’s eyes narrow on her before he slams the door shut in their faces.

“Robin!” Steve exclaims

“Oh, good,” Robin grumbles, turning towards him, and that’s when he sees the bruise forming along the curve of her eye. They’d _hit_ her. “You’re awake again.”

“Why the fuck did you guys come to my house?!” Steve asks before he rides the anger Robin’s injury suddenly sparks up in him, his voice way higher than he wants it to be. “Are you out of your mind? We’re on red alert!”

“You sent us a message in morse code!” Jonathan says quickly. “About a ransom note!”

“We thought you were being careful about being tapped,” Nancy mutters. It’s clear she’s rethinking the situation, which, you know, was pointless now that they were all being held hostage again.

Steve groans. “And you thought I wouldn’t just go to you with it? I don’t even _know_ morse code!”

“I told you he wasn’t that smart,” Robin mutters, and Steve doesn’t even have the energy to glare at her.

“We all were tired, alright? And we thought your parents were home,” Nancy tries gently, though the look of caged fury in her eyes tells an entirely different story. She had been tricked, and now she was pissed. “We weren’t thinking clearly.”

“Obviously! You brought Jonathan!” Steve wrenches his head in Jonathan’s direction, and Jonathan rolls his eyes.

“I know morse code,” he explains dryly.

“So do I,” Robin fires back, almost venomous. “You could have stayed in bed.”

Jonathan shoots her a dirty look and drops his head, and the conversation they’d had back in the motel room pings around in Steve’s head. Jonathan just hadn’t wanted to be useless again.

Steve deflates.

“What are we going to do?” he asks the floor so he doesn’t have to look at any of them.

Robin scoffs. “I’m going to run off and get the police, obviously.”

Steve head snaps up, and then he almost blacks out when it makes his vision swirl and a stab of pain lightning up the back of his head. He thinks he hears Nancy or Robin call his name, but he’s breathing too hard to really hear them clearly.

After a moment, he opens eyes he hadn’t realized he’d closed, and he swallows thickly before asking, “How the hell are you going to get away? We’re probably being watched, they could shoot us the second we get out of here.”

Robin stares at him, and then she shakes her head.

“There’s no one outside, Steve. It’s just them.”

Steve stares back at her, incredulous. Those assholes came in, took over his house, and they were acting alone?

What the hell?

Robin seems to understand his silent incredulity. “These guys are idiots,” Robin explains slowly, her eyes searching Steve like she expected him to keel over right there. “They were talking all about how they couldn’t get ahold of the others and what they were going to do about it while they were hauling me into the bedroom before they realized I could understand a lot of what they were saying. _Ew,_ Nance, not for that—”

Steve looks over to Nancy to find her face pale and her eyes wide, just before it flushed a full, unsurprisingly pretty red. Of course Nancy, full mortification, was still pretty.

“I didn’t say anything,” Nancy hisses, her eyes darting away.

“Yeah, I can read your face easy. They only questioned me about opening the portal thing and if Steve was lying about it.”

“Why you?” Jonathan asks.

Robin shrugs, but it’s a small movement because of her arms twisted together behind her back. “Probably thought I was with Steve. Maybe they were around the first time Steve and I got interrogated. I don’t know.”

Jonathan’s eyes dart to Steve. Why, Steve doesn’t know, because it’s not explicitly obvious on his face.

“Okay,” he says quickly, before they can devolve to something else and give the Russians time to catch them doing … whatever it is they’re doing. Breaking out? “Okay, okay. _How_ are you expecting to escape, Robin?”

Robin just looks at him. “You have a window, Steve,” she says like she’s talking to a simpleton. Steve would be offended if that wasn’t just how Robin always was. “You have a window, right in your kitchen.”

“Okay…” Steve drawls slowly, because he’s following, but he still doesn’t know where she’s taking him with this. Nancy does, though, if the way her head perks up suddenly is any indication. Jonathan looks just as lost as Steve, though, which makes him feel a little better about the fact that he's not getting it yet.

Robin pauses, probably for effect, but the way she does it makes it seem like she’s waiting for Steve to catch on when she definitely knows better. “I’m going to climb out the window, Steve.”

Steve blinks. Then blinks again. Robin holds up a leg, and Steve realizes her legs aren’t tied like his were. In fact, Steve is the only one bound at the ankles. Did they run out of belts?

“How are you going to get the window open?” he asks instead of complaining, despite _really_ wanting to.

“With my hands, dingus.”

Steve looks pointedly at her hands, which are bound behind her. “Yeah? How?”

She wiggles her eyebrows, throwing Steve off guard until she asks, “So, who’s the best with their mouth?”

And that’s how Steve ends up with a mouth full of leather belt as he works the damn thing off of her wrists. It’s a thicker belt, at least, so they couldn’t tie it as intricately as they had him, who they had used their best skills on, clearly thinking him the most dangerous, but it’s still alligator leather, and the texture makes him slip up a few times before he can hook his front teeth into one of the grooves and really yank. His broken nose keeps him from going at it as fiercely as he wants to—bumping it just once learns him a lesson he doesn’t want to repeat anytime soon—so it takes it slow, and it’s a slippery kind of slow that seems to take decades rather than minutes.

“Ow!” Robin hisses when Steve jerks his head to the side, his mouth full of belt. “That was my _skin_, Hannibal.”

“Mm hoin wh I cah,” Steve hisses back, refusing to let go on the damn good hold he’d finally gotten.

Robin continues to grumble and spit as Steve works through his ministrations, but, eventually, she’s able to slip her wrists out. She rubs them gingerly as she struggles to her feet without knocking her head on one of the shelves.

“Wait,” Steve calls just before she goes for the door handle. “Why can’t you just spring us all?”

“Because they’ll bail if they notice us all gone, and those fuckers can’t be allowed to escape again.”

“Are we forgetting someone had to have let them go the first time?” Jonathan pipes up.

Robin frowns down at him. “You think there’s an accomplice somewhere?”

“What else would there be?”

Robin hesitates, her brows coming together in thought. “Do we take the chance?”

“What other choice do we have?” Nancy asks, sounding defeated in a way Steve decidedly hates.

Robin bites her lip, her gaze on Nancy unyielding and almost desperate. “I’ll get everything moving as fast as I can,” she promises, and Steve can see how much that weak promise hurts her to say.

“Be careful,” Jonathan says as Robin silently turns the handle to the pantry, and Robin nods her silent understanding before she vanishes from view.

* * *

There’s no possible way to tell the amount of time that passes from Robin’s escape, but Nancy, Jonathan, and Steve all spend a good amount of it in a strange solidarity of silence, the fear of things not working out a little too much to do anything more than look at each other and stare at the walls, trying to listen hard for any movement from above them that might signal the Russian’s return. Aside from the occasional distant noise of heavy footsteps, there’s not much to go on.

Nancy is the first to break the silence, only after Steve shifts his weight where he’s perched against a wall and winces when it makes his arms throb with pins and needles, “Do you want me to take your binds off?”

Steve looks over at her. “Do you think it’s a good idea?”

“Robin’s already gone,” Jonathan points out quietly. “What more could we do to make it worse?”

That’s a good point, Steve has to admit, and he agrees to letting Nancy work his binds off with her small teeth, only after she refuses to let him go first on one of them due to the way his face is starting to swell at new corners thanks to his last attempt. She works surprisingly fast compared to his time, and he’s free in a matter of minutes. He quickly works through Nancy’s and Jonathan’s belts before going for the one at his feet, and then, finally, they’re half-free of the prison they’d been thrown into.

Unfortunately, however, there’s no room for victory.

Just after Steve gets the belt around his ankles pried loose, the door opens, and one of the Russians stands in the frame. Immediately, he realizes Robin is missing. He turns and barks something frantic over his shoulder, then glares down at the three left. Steve opens his mouth to say something that is actually probably a bad idea to say, but doesn’t get the chance to test the theory before the Russian is stomping over and grabbing Jonathan by the collar of his shirt, hauling him to his feet. Jonathan makes a strangled noise, and Steve immediately thinks of his fresh Demogorgan-inflicted wound.

_Why_ did they bring him?!

Whatever Steve had been about to say, it changes immediately into a semi-desperate plea of, _“NO!”_

“Stop, no, _stop!”_ Nancy says at the same time as the Russian yanks Jonathan out of the room. Steve jumps to his feet—swaying enough to fall against one of the shelves when he moves too fast for his blood-filled sinuses to cope with—and struggles to throw himself at them, only to get the door slammed in his face so fast he almost re-breaks his nose, if such a thing were possible.

He screams, falling away from the door and desperately clutching his face. The door had, in actuality, barely bumped it, but it had sent such a sparking pain along the planes of Steve’s face that Steve felt as if he were going to black out from the force of it.

Nancy catches him, caught between howling for them to give Jonathan back and crying Steve’s name to see if he was okay, and her fingernails bite into the skin of his arms even beneath his shirt. She props him against a wall, and he only just wrenches open his eyes in time to see her trying, and failing, to throw the door open.

“DAMMIT!” she screams, flinging herself once, then battering her fists against it in an angry rhythm. “OPEN THE DOOR!”

“SHUT UP!” a voice yells back, more accented than the Russian who had been doing the interrogation on Steve, and Steve realizes the other Russian, Gun, must be blocking the door.

He struggles to his feet, about to aid Nancy in her attempt at breaking the door open with her fists instead of pushing, when Jonathan starts screaming.

Nancy freezes. Steve springs into motion.

“Move!” Steve orders quickly, then steadies himself for his next move.

Leaning back first on one leg, he holds onto the shelves on either side of him and lifts himself up, kicking both feet against the door just as Nancy jumps out of the way. The fragile door goes concave on its hinges, just for a split second, and a grunt comes from the other side.

He does it again. The door starts to splinter and crack on his side. His knees start to ache, and his ankle is screaming for him to stop.

“One more,” he half-whispers to Nancy, breathing hard, and she stares at him with wide eyes.

But when he readies himself for the final blow, a noise of a gun going off shatters the air in his stead, and the door flies open again just as Steve’s feet are getting ready to connect with it.

With nothing for his feet to land on, Steve’s hands slip from the shelves with the momentum, and he lands on his back hard enough to knock all the wind from his lungs.

“Shit,” a new voice says, and Steve blinks up into the face of Officer Callahan as he writhes on the ground, Nancy next to him and holding his head while he tried his best to breathe again. “Didn’t mean to do that.”

“Smooth,” another says, sounding exactly like Robin, and Officer Callahan steps aside.

“You did it,” Nancy says faintly, staring up at Robin in awe.

Robin grins back, the bruise along her eye stretching with the movement. “Consider yourselves rescued.”

Thank god, Steve thinks, finally able to breathe a little again, and then he lies his head back on the cool ground of the pantry and doesn’t bother thinking anymore, at least for that moment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Holy shit, guys, we've only got three more left.


	29. numb

They’re forced to sign some form of disclosure following the arrest of the two Russian men—unnecessarily complicated legal documents Steve could never understand in full even if he tried, intended to keep them from telling the public the details they weren’t capable of handling after the summer they’d endured and the losses they’d had—and Steve signs them without thinking much of it, just like he’d signed everything else he’d had to in order to be allowed to move on with his life. He’s treated for his injuries by cold-faced doctor brought to the scene with the heavy-duty officials to keep him out of the hospital and watching gazes, all while in his bedroom alone, where he’d been ordered to after being pulled from the floor of his pantry. Previous involvement apparently had its perks, because, apparently, they’d been expecting Steve and the rest of the crew to be targeted again at some point, and then just happened to not inform Steve or anyone else of this and allow him to go on his merry way while waiting for activity to pop up on their radar, which apparently never happened.

America. God fucking bless, or something like that.

They interrogate him as they treat him, much to his displeasure, and he answers as well as he can without delving into the monster business. Most of the questions have to do with Hopper, whom they had taken into custody almost immediately under the guise of making sure it was really him, when Steve knew it was actually because he’d last been seen in a Russian bunker, and they thought he had valuable information on him. Steve hopes that doesn’t mean it’ll be weeks, months even, until he sees Hopper again, but he knows there’s nothing he can do about it.

He doesn’t tell them there might be one more. He doesn’t know how to explain that one without telling them they’d tied up the Russians before, and then having to explain why they’d tied the Russians up, and then an entire spiral from there into things he can’t go into without talking about monsters—so he doesn’t say a word, and they don’t seem to notice a thing. And he goes through the motions that follow.

Jonathan is okay—thank God above and Billy below. He ripped a couple stitches, but that was from struggling when No-Gun was manhandling him around. The screaming had come from a distraction tactic he’d thought up on the spot once noticing Hopper lurking in a corner and waiting for an opening to attack.

Robin’s got her shiner, and Nancy’s got a bruise the size of Steve’s want for things to just fucking stop on her hip from where she’d tried to hip-check one of the Russians upon arriving at Steve’s and failing due to the fact they both were, like, twice her size, but that’s the extent of their injuries.

Steve’s got a broken nose and a concussion, but he actually gets both treated for once in his life (which, okay, it was because he wasn’t given a choice, but who’s to say he wouldn’t have done it on his own anyway?) and is deemed stable enough to return to his life once the FBI—or the CIA or whatever the hell the assholes who won’t leave him or his friends alone are supposed to be—are done with him completely.

He’s released, he’s tired, and, holy shit, he’s going to have to explain everything again to his parents once they make it back from the—whatever it is they’re doing. Steve can’t remember, and he really doesn’t care. He gets lectured by Joyce the moment she gets done with Jonathan, but it’s a half-hearted lecture, and he thinks that has something to do with the state of his face, which, holy shit, those Russians had better hope he heals okay or he might just hunt them down himself and give them a piece of his mind for ruining one of the only things he had going for him. The lecture doesn’t last long, and he gets dinner out of it, because Joyce makes him come along to eat the take-out they get in lieu of anyone having to cook. It’s greasy Chinese, but he’s not complaining.

He does, however, want to complain when Nancy and Jonathan somehow end up back at his place, after he was almost completely sure he’d said nothing upon leaving the premises after dinner to _indicate _that he was leaving, and yet still found them both already sitting in his car when he went to figure out what he did with his keys.

He looked down at them; they looked back. They were wearing identical expressions asking him to challenge them and just see what would happen, and, instead of doing exactly that, he sighed, slid into his seat, and drove them to his house, where the police tape still sat waving in the wind. The rooms used by the Russians were roped off, and he wasn’t allowed to step foot in them until they were combed fully for any residual evidence that might have been missed on the first go, but he had the rest of the house, and he was too done with it all to really give a shit when he finally got back.

And that’s how he found himself, Nancy, and Jonathan sitting in his living room, TV blaring _Cheers_ reruns, with a pint of ice cream in Jonathan’s lap and three spoons sticking out of it, with barely more than a few words said between the three of them. It was quiet, a little awkward, and entirely more than Steve is prepared to deal with.

So, naturally, Nancy challenges that, but only after Steve’s had about an hour of it to wallow in and get bored of, proving she still knew Steve better than anyone might attest to otherwise.

“Robin’s not happy she had to go home,” she starts idly, easily, as she grabs one of the spoons (they weren’t keeping track of whose was whose at this point, honestly) and digs a chunk out of the lap-softened Rocky Road.

“She’ll be around first thing in the morning,” Steve replies, leaning his head back against the couch. His legs were as akimbo as a loveseat with three people allowed, and his knee pressed flush against Jonathan’s where he had it curled beneath him, holding the ice cream tub in place without freezing his genitals off. It felt strangely anchoring, like he was afloat in the world after the relief of getting the feds involved and this small human contact was the only thing keeping him from floating away into the numbing calm he’d fallen into. “Bet you ten bucks she’s here before nine.”

“Thought she didn’t get up before ten unless work called.”

Steve blinks, then turns to look at Jonathan. “How did you know that?”

Jonathan shrugs. “I listen, you know. Just because I’m quiet doesn’t mean I’m not there.”

“We’ve been around her a lot this past week,” Nancy cuts in, smacking her hand against Jonathan’s shoulder. “You learn a lot about someone when you spend, like, every waking hour with them for a few days.”

Steve narrows his eyes, but nods slowly all the same. “She makes exceptions when it’s something she really wants.”

It’s Jonathan’s turn to blink, and he does so even as he’s tilting his head to raise his eyebrows at Steve. “I thought you said she wasn’t your type.”

“It’s _me_ whose not _her_ type, and, no, it’s not like that, Jesus Christ.” Steve rucks his shoulder up, close enough to Jonathan that it easily knocks against him. “Stop riding my ass about that. Since when do you care anything about my feelings toward someone, anyway?”

Jonathan purses his lips, and then his brow furrows up and his eyes dart away, like he’s realizing something. “I apologized for that.”

“Apologized for what?” Nancy asks sharply in the same moment Steve simply goes, “Huh?”

Jonathan blanches. “Oh. You weren’t talking about— You know what? Don’t worry about it.” He stands up suddenly, careful of his side, dislodging both Steve and one of the spoons, which lands neatly on Steve’s crotch, before fast-walking his way out of the living room and presumably to the kitchen. Steve and Nancy watch him go until he disappears around a corner.

Steve looks at Nancy over the space Jonathan vacated, and Nancy looks at Steve. And then, she raises her eyebrows and tilts her head in a silent command, and Steve thinks maybe he’s not as bad at silent communication as he thinks.

Steve stands up with a sigh and follows Jonathan to the kitchen, taking the ice cream from him just as he’s cramming the lid on and setting it on a counter haphazardly as he corners Jonathan in the space where two counters met.

“You wanna tell me what’s going on?” he asks gently, though it’s less of a question than it’s presented as, and Jonathan seems to realize this by the way his mouth thins.

“Does it matter?”

“Uh, yeah, kinda.” Duh, why else would Steve have followed him? But Steve doesn’t say that—he thinks maybe it wouldn’t hold well when he actually wanted answers. “Come on,” he urges with a beckoning wave of his hand. “Whatever you got, it can’t measure up to the absolute bullshit this week has been.”

Jonathan balks for a moment, dropping his head down. And then he takes a deep breath and says quietly, “Remember when you told me you still loved Nancy and I was okay with it? When I— When she kissed you, and I didn’t stop her?”

Jonathan looks up, like he’s checking to see if Steve’s listening. Steve nods to show he is. Jonathan swallows loudly.

“It’s because I wanted it to happen,” he whispers, and Steve thinks for a moment he heard Jonathan wrong.

And then Steve is shaking his head in surprise, leaning away and blinking at some point in the distance like it could help him better process the information Jonathan just dropped on him.

“Are you— Are you trying to set me back up with your girlfriend?” Steve finally tries, looking at Jonathan again, unable to keep his manner anything but shocked.

A number expressions seem to cross Jonathan’s face in the span of a handful of seconds—confusion, horror, thought, confusion again, humor, distress—before vanishing in the palm of his hand, where he raises it and presses it against his face.

“Technically?” he mutters, muffled by the flesh against his mouth. “Yes. Yes, I kind of am.”

Steve just gapes at him. “I’m missing something here. I _have_ to be missing something here.”

Jonathan groans, his other hand coming up to join the first. He stays like that for a few moments, and Steve lets him, because he has no idea what’s happening, and he doesn’t want to push Jonathan and lose the plot altogether. He’ll get his answer, he knows that much, because he wasn’t allowing Jonathan to leave this room until at least a little more was explained to him, due to the fact he was really tired of being lost in the things happening around and to him.

But then Jonathan drops his hands and looks at Steve, and Steve suddenly gets it.

Because he’s looking at Steve like Steve once looked at Nancy when Nancy was slowly breaking his heart, and there was nothing confusing about _that_.

And Steve doesn’t really bother to think much about what he does next.

_This is a bad idea,_ some part of Steve’s brain supplies as he leans in and closes the distance between him and Jonathan, but then he’s _kissing_ Jonathan, and it doesn’t _feel_ like a bad idea. A little strange, he muses when he has a spark of clarity, just as he’s pulling away, about what it is he’s just done, but Jonathan pushing forward to close the distance back up buries that spark nice and deep and Steve doesn’t think about it again. Steve pulls Jonathan towards him, his hands grappling for the worn collar of Jonathan’s T-shirt, and guides him slowly back until they’re in the living room and on the couch again, Steve beneath Jonathan, and Jonathan climbs on without breaking away, his hands braced against the back of the couch and caging Steve in.

“Oh, good,” Nancy greets from the La-Z-Boy, “you managed to crack his thick skull.”

Steve attempts to make a retort, but it’s stolen from him when Jonathan leans in and scrapes his teeth along the stubble coating Steve’s jawline, and all Steve can do is make a verbal noise that has absolutely nothing to do with Nancy’s remark.

She grins, and then she pulls herself from the chair and makes her way over.

“Room for another?” she asks primly as Jonathan pulls away, and then she’s in Steve’s lap.

“We— We should talk about this,” Steve says, his final few brain cells remaining after all he’d been through rubbing together enough to spark a little common sense. “Before we—do things. Right? Isn’t that what smart adults do?”

“In the morning, Steve,” Nancy whispers against his mouth as she leans up. Jonathan’s hands follow before Steve can even agree, and he’s lost to the static his mind becomes from there.

A new kind of calming numb spreads from somewhere in his chest as Jonathan pulls Steve’s shirt off, accompanied by a burning hot fire that zips along his spine, and Steve realizes she’s right—he can worry about it in the morning.

Right now, he had better things he wanted to do.


	30. recovery

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WHOOPS lost track of time today. Pre-Halloween rush! 
> 
> (Also, again, didn't have time to proof-read! I'll get around to it later)

As great as Steve’s evening goes, his night does not go well at all. He falls asleep almost too easily, pressed somewhere between Nancy and Jonathan on the floor of his living room, and he pays for the ease in his dreams.

His nightmares are relentless, ruthless, and he startles awake too many times to count as the night goes along. Enough times that, after the first few, Nancy and Jonathan both unconsciously roll away from him as they sleep on to keep from being jolted awake each time he comes alive with a scream curdled in his throat and the feeling of a hand squeezing the life out of him, the breath needed to birth his cry of terror stolen by the dark of the night.

He doesn’t know why he feels like he’s being choked each time his eyes snap open—they’d never touched his throat. It had all been head and torso, and yet, every single time, he wakes up unable to breathe. Like he was dying in his dreams, and his body couldn’t remember to start back up until after he’d already opened his eyes and suffered the fallout.

But he’s so tired, so sore, so unwilling to just wake up and stay up and try to move on from what his mind won’t let him forget, that he continues to try and sleep. Every single time. He’s not so stupid as to think anything different will happen when he does—but he doesn’t let that stop him. He can’t. He doesn’t have the energy to try anything else.

He just wants to move on and be done. He just wants to rest.

He just wants to actually be okay for once.

The sun is barely peeking through the window by the time Steve startles awake for the—fuck, who was even counting anymore? —time, and that’s when Steve finally, finally throws in the towel and decides to wake up completely and stay up. He hadn’t won the battle against his mind, not really, but he’d put up a good fight, and, honestly? He was going to name his autobiography that, if he ever got around to growing up into that kind of person.

_Didn’t win the battle, but put up a damn good fight._

Yeah. That sounds like token Steve. Dustin would probably be the first to attest to that.

Steve lies there for a while at first, on his back, head pillowed by two of the throw pillows from the couch and arms thrown over his face to block out the scant light the rising morning offered, thinking about Dustin critiquing the shit out of his autobiography as one final jab against his brain telling him he wasn’t allowed to be asleep. Nancy and Jonathan are both curled away from him, spurned in the night by his restless waking terror, and Steve turns his head this way and that, watching their rising shoulders for a few breaths each, before he heaves a bone-weary sigh and pulls himself to his feet.

It’s still cold enough for the floor to feel like ice against his bare feet this early in the morning, but he kind of revels in the way it wakes him up completely as he makes his way into the kitchen to start up a pot of coffee and wait for the others to rise. He notes the sad-looking ice cream container sitting in a puddle of condensation on the counter where he’d left it the night before and smiles, the good part of the night before he’d fallen asleep rushing back to him. His smile only lasts a beat before it wilts slightly, Nancy’s words ghosting along the forefront of his mind.

_In the morning, Steve,_ she’d told him, just before she’d leaned in and kissed him from beneath Jonathan’s encroaching form.

Well, it was morning, and he wasn’t going to let Nancy or Jonathan out of his house until he figured out what the hell had just happened and what it meant for them as a whole.

As much as he wants to balk from the idea of dealing with something that could have ruined one of the only friendships he had left, he knows it can’t end as badly as his fear wants him to think. Because he knows Nancy and Jonathan—maybe not as well as they knew each other, but he’d been around their blocks a few times now, and he’s pretty sure they wouldn’t just up and leave him without at least a little to ease his mind when Jonathan had basically already admitted he’d been waiting for something like this to happen and had even tried to push it along.

And, besides. Like he’d told Jonathan when Jonathan had tried to run away—it couldn’t compare to what he’d just been through not even a full day before, never mind the entire week before that. That was shit that would stick with him for the rest of his life. Kissing a guy—and his girlfriend, who Steve was still in love with? At the same time? Doing more?

It did not come close anymore. It didn’t even try.

And, yeah, previous to the mess that happened there, Steve probably would have turn tail and gotten the fuck out of dodge the second he realized he was feeling something other than friendship for another guy and that guy was giving it back. He wasn’t exactly against it—it was 1986, for fuck’s sake, there were bigger humanitarian issues at hand to deal with than people wanting to kiss each other regardless of the junk they were rocking—but that didn’t mean he would be comfortable with handling what it would have done to him mentally when he had people behind him who would have crushed him for it without even blinking. He wasn’t proud of who he’d been before he’d had the chance to grow, but he’d be lying if he said he would have handled it okay.

He thanks all the lords above that he’d met Robin after he’d dropped the douchebag front, because it scares him to think of what he might have done to save face if he had learned about her back when all he’d wanted to do was keep his name in everyone’s minds, for the better or the worse.

He didn’t care about that shit, not at the bottom of it all. But he knows what he would have done to keep Tommy and Carol and all those other stupid fucks from trying to undermine him and make him look weak.

And he hates it. He loathes the guy he had been, because Robin means the universe to him, and the guy he is today would pummel the guy he used to be for doing what he would have done, and anyone else who would do the same.

And, Jesus Christ, he’s actually thinking about how good of a take monsters had ended up being for him. Sure, he’d been on the turnaround for the better _before_ he’d shown up at Jonathan’s house to apologize and found more than he bargained for behind that front door—but the monster had pushed him into Nancy and Jonathan as a whole, and there was nothing like pure, unadulterated terror to change a guy into the person he really wanted to be, even if the scars of the event still haunted him to this day, three, four years later.

Steve tilts his head back as the coffee machine beeps its readiness, and he huffs a sob of a laugh that barely makes any noise as it passes his lips.

He thinks time will heal him, maybe, because that’s what they always said when things went to shit and his world was falling apart around him and he tried to bundle it all up and pretend his life was moving along as smoothly as it could despite what the world had done to it.

Time was all he really had in the end, and it’s not like he has anything better to do than let it happen.

* * *

Nancy and Jonathan arise a little after the sun has come all the way up from where it skirted the horizon when Steve got up, at what Steve assumes is the same time together, and they amble into the kitchen to find him sitting on the counter and reading the newspaper, downing his third cup of coffee for the morning and practically vibrating in place with over-caffeination.

They greet him silently—Nancy with a sleepy nod and a pat of her hand on his bare foot where he has it crossed over his knee before she helps herself to the coffee and Jonathan with a wary glance that Steve misses the beginning of while buried behind the large shield of his newspaper. He catches the tail end of it though, and he doesn’t miss the way Jonathan basically tip-toes around him to get his share of morning brew, so he sighs dramatically and drops the newspaper down, snapping it in that way they always did in movies.

Jonathan startles a little at the action, and Steve starts off his declaration with a wince of an apology.

“So,” he begins, “we gonna talk about last night?”

Now Jonathan winces, but Nancy only sighs tiredly into her cup. “Not awake enough for this, Steve.”

Steve purses his lips, tilting his head. “What exactly do you think is going to do down that you have to be that awake for? I’m not going to drill you two. I just want to know the why and the when.”

Jonathan blinks at him, his eyes a startled wide, and then hisses a curse when he overfills his coffee cup and the liquid splatters onto the counter. Steve tries not to laugh, but it’s hard, and he knows his face is turning red from the strain of it by the way Nancy gives him a deadpan look.

“You don’t care about the sexual implications?” Jonathan asks hastily as he mops his mistake up, his eyes firmly on the counter in front of him.

“What, that I got my hands down your pants and tangoed with your—?”

“Yes!” Jonathan cuts in, his voice sharp and high like a yelp, head snapping up to face Steve and face aflame. “The whole guy on guy part, yes, Steve, that’s what I’m talking about!”

Steve shrugs. “I don’t really care.”

Jonathan freezes. Nancy blinks at him in surprise. Steve sighs and sets his coffee aside.

“I’m not into guys,” Steve insists, then scoffs and rakes a hand through his hair. “Or, alright. Never been into them before,” he amends, looking at Jonathan out of the corner of his eye. “Kicking monster ass together did more than just make _Nancy_ fall for you, alright? Apparently I have a problem with getting the hots for anyone I get beat up with while fighting bad guys, and you’re included. It was just easier to ignore since, you know.” He shrugs. “I was busy convincing myself I wasn’t into anyone just so I’d stop pining for people who didn’t want me.”

Neither of them respond. Something crosses their faces at the same time, like they’re two halves of a single person, but it vanishes before Steve can decipher any part of it.

Then, with a teasing lilt, Jonathan says, “So you _do_ have a crush on Robin.”

And Steve can’t help but start laughing. Because he wasn’t wrong, not at one point.

_“Did,”_ is all he says, and refuses to answer anything else about that from that point on.

“So you’re … okay with this?” Nancy tries slowly, shuffling from foot to foot absentmindedly.

“Oh, yeah,” agrees Steve with a nod of his head. “Definitely. Would like more of it, if you’re willing to pony up.”

Nancy turns to look at Jonathan, and Jonathan looks back at her, an indescribable look on his face as something passes between them.

Then Nancy turns back with that gentle smile on her face, the one Steve always loved, and says, “We’d like that, Steve. We’d like that a lot.”

* * *

They try to keep relatively chill from there—drinking coffee, skirting around each other shyly despite Steve’s declaration that he didn’t actually care, charging the air with a tension Steve knows all the names to but has never really felt so steadily in such a way as he does now with both Nancy and Jonathan toeing his line—and Jonathan offers to make breakfast, which Steve jumps on so hard that the smile Jonathan gives in response makes Steve snap, and he grabs Jonathan’s head to kiss his temple in a move he learned not all that long ago.

The motions feel like healing. They feel right—and they feel like they’re something Steve has been aching to do for longer than he could possibly have realized.

Jonathan laughs a full, raspy laugh as Steve pulls him in, and then turns on him and sticks his hands in Steve’s hair and wrestles with him and until they’re pulled from the kitchen and into the hallway with Nancy watching patiently, two steps from doing more when Steve’s front door suddenly flies open and there stands Robin, one hand on her hip and spare house key perched in her fingers.

“Mind telling me why you wouldn’t answer your damn radio, Harringt—” she starts, then stops abruptly, like she’d hit a wall she hadn’t seen in front of her.

Robin’s eyes widen as she looks from Steve’s disheveled hair, to Jonathan’s red face, to Nancy’s grin, and then she bursts into laughter, long and delighted. “Finally!” she crows gleefully between laughs, clapping her hands together.

Steve stares at her. “Finally? What do you mean, _finally?”_ He turns to look at Nancy and Jonathan questioningly, and is greeted by two identical sheepish expressions, and that’s when it clicks. “Oh, my god. No. Seriously?” Annoyed, he turns to Robin again, but she’s still laughing. “Was I the last one to catch onto this?!”

Robin winks at him, now smothering her chuckles behind the heel of her hand as she shoves the front door shut behind her with her foot, then pats Steve on the shoulder in the facade of consolation when she reaches his side. “Like understands like,” she coos cryptically, and Steve tilts her head at his in an exaggeration of question of her sanity.

He throws his arms up as Robin vanishes into the kitchen, followed quickly by Jonathan and Nancy as they duck away from Steve’s prying confusion. “Just once, I would like to be in the know how about things regarding me and my feelings, _before _everyone else is!”

“Not a chance, Stevie!” Robin calls back, but Steve can tell by her inflection that she’s over the moon about this, and he finds he can’t stay mad when everything was falling into place for just that moment in time.

Instead, he sighs, quietly, and scrapes his hair back from his face with his hand, wincing slightly when he grazes a lump left behind from his assault.

“You know,” a voice starts gently, quietly, and Steve looks up to see Nancy peering at him from around the kitchen corner, her hands pressed on the edge like a child watching, “we would have told you eventually.”

Steve hesitates, and realizes then that _that_ is why it had bothered him. And then he realizes, again, that Nancy _knew _him, maybe better than he knew himself, and that maybe she hadn’t fallen out of love quite as much as he’d been led to believe all this time.

“We love you, Steve,” she whispers, like she’s reading his damn mind, and that hits him harder than anything else that’s been said thus far. “And I know we should have said that sooner. We didn't—don’t want to lose you.”

He swallows thickly, angling his face away. “Who said anything about losing me?”

She hesitates like she’s shocked, but when Steve looks up at her again, she’s got a look in her eye like Steve had just given her the world, and he has no words for how that makes him feel in return. He holds her gaze, just for a moment too long, and then he winks, slow, stupid, and entirely what the moment needs to keep from being too much, and the atmosphere shatters completely.

Nancy rolls her eyes, but there’s a smile beneath them, and she holds her hand out to beckon him back into the kitchen. “You’re an idiot, Steve Harrington.”

“I’m yours, Nancy Wheeler,” he replies gently, taking her hand, feeling the warmth of her palm against his. “I’ve always been yours.”

And, he thinks as she pulls him into the kitchen just in time to see Robin dropping an egg and Jonathan trying and failing to catch it, finally, this was how his life was supposed to be.

This was his family. His friends. This was what he’d wanted, after all the monsters and the nightmares and the terror had ended. This is where he wanted to be. This was his end.

All he had to do was take it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more. What the fuck.


	31. embrace

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one's a little less of a final chapter and a little more of an epilogue!
> 
> Enjoy, and thank you for making it this far!
> 
> Oh, and happy Halloween!! ♡

Jonathan leaves two days later.

Hopper is released from wherever the government had been holding him with a strict order of some kind to answer any and all calls that come his way, and he comes home to a town that declared him dead and doesn’t know how to handle him being anything but. It’s strange, the way people react to him, but it’s almost stranger the way they react to Alexei, who Hopper had returned with after something had gone down with the government to keep Alexei out of American custody. Some kind of deal, Steve’s movie intellect tells him.

Steve doesn’t know the details of Hopper’s release, not totally, and Hopper won’t sit still long enough to tell all of them when they all go out for brunch at the diner the day before the Byers leave, most likely because of the way the kids shut up faster than Steve has ever seen them when Hopper opens his mouth and starts to speak. Nosy little shits.

Steve gets it, though, honestly. It’s not safe for the kids—hell, it’s not safe for any of them—to have information beyond what they already know, and they already knew enough to be on the precipice of perpetual silence as it was.

Jonathan leaves two days later, and he leaves with Will and Joyce promising they’ll be back and forth until it was time for them to move back home for good. El almost goes with them, almost, but something she says to Hopper when Hopper tries to push her along stops him cold, and she ends up staying with him in the old Byers house while the three Byers members return to pack all their things up and come back to Hawkins again to stay.

This time, Steve makes sure his calendar is clear for the day.

* * *

This time, Steve’s with the crew when they say goodbye. It’s less of a “goodbye” and more of a “I’ll see you next weekend,” but it still hits harder than Steve expects to see Jonathan standing there in front of his old house, hands buried deep in the pockets of his jeans, with Nancy beside him as Steve pulls himself out of his car with significantly less fluidity than Robin does from the passenger seat next to him.

Nancy and Jonathan turn to meet Steve and Robin as they make their way up the short driveway, barking greetings to the kids that they mostly ignore as they mingle on the lawn and argue something out with Will, who looks torn between laughing and being completely done with whatever Mike and Max are trying to puzzle out for him. Jonathan raises his hand in a greeting, his lips parted around god knows what, when Robin flings herself at him and Nancy without warning, her arms around both their necks.

“I’ve only known you guys a week and I feel like our family is breaking up,” she says as she nearly chokes them both. It’s clear she’s playing it up, for a reason Steve doesn’t know but also doesn’t really care to, but thinks it might have something to do with the way Joyce was staring at them curiously like she thought something was going on. Joyce looks away, and Steve forgets completely about it.

Nancy pats her back, and Jonathan just looks like a deer in headlights. Steve rolls his eyes and does nothing to help.

“I’ll— I’ll be back every weekend, though,” says Joanthan, strangled. Robin releases them and backs up a step.

“I’m not a fan of having to wait a week for my show,” she replies haughtily, and Nancy starts to laugh in the same moment Steve makes a noise of offense.

“What are we, some sitcom?” he heckles her, but she only smiles sweetly.

“What? I was rooting for you guys, now I want to watch the results.”

Jonathan blushes a full-body blush, and Steve does him the favor of looking away lest he imprint that to his memory for more than just shits and giggles.

“So you’re friends now?” Steve asks Robin as he turns, more to tease her than anything. She’d judged not only Steve, but also Nancy, and probably even Jonathan, before getting to know them all, and Steve couldn’t help but feel a little vindicated that Robin now willingly—and wanted to, even—hung out with some of the most important people to Steve.

“Oh, you know,” Robin says idly, waving her hands, “I hook them up, they hook me up.”

Steve blinks, taken aback. When did that become a thing. “Wait,” he starts slowly, his eyes flicking over to Jonathan and Nancy, who look as unperturbed as two people can while in Steve and Robin’s combined presence. “What?”

“You’ll never believe who knows a girl,” Robin says slyly, and Steve does a double-take before blinking at Nancy in question. She shakes her head, smiling, and jabs a thumb at Jonathan.

“_You_ know a lesbian?” Steve whisper-squawks unattractively, now apparently fully aware Jonathan and Nancy both were in on Robin’s secret. “I thought that was my thing!”

“They’re not that rare, Steve,” Jonathan says dryly. “You pick up the misfits when you’re a misfit yourself, is all.”

Steve tries not to be put out, but he knows he doesn’t manage, maybe not even remotely, because Jonathan leans in and nudges Steve’s shoulder to get him to stop. Steve pushes back, and Nancy rolls he eyes and turns to Robin to say something most likely at Steve and Jonathan’s expense.

Jonathan glances at her, and then shares a secret smirk with Steve that, honestly, completely does Steve’s head in without even trying, and the next thing he knows he’s reaching out to grab at Jonathan with his whole body.

He pulls Jonathan in, feeling the way his shoulder tense at first underneath Steve’s arms before they relax and he all but melts into Steve’s embrace, face dropping into the curve of Steve’s neck like his mother wasn’t ten feet away and trying to make sure Hopper fed El something other than Triple Decker Eggo Extravaganzas for the five days they’d be gone and did her homework so the school didn’t investigate her lack of return.

Steve huffs a laugh, presses his fingers into the back of Jonathan’s neck, and whispers, “Easy, tiger, your mom is going to notice.”

Jonathan snorts a response, his hands fisting the fabric of Steve’s shirt at his sides for just a beat, and then he pulls away. His expression is somewhere between deadpan and incredulity. Steve smiles in return, just before Nancy nudges Steve aside and throws herself at Jonathan, just to be an ass and take his thunder.

God, he missed her.

He ambles away to the side, still smiling, and Robin throws an arm around his shoulders as they watch Jonathan and Nancy hug it out.

“So,” she starts idly, her voice low, “what’cha doing on Saturday?”

Steve looks at her out of the corner of his eye, then mocks a shrug. “Hmm, I don’t know,” he drawls, and Nancy and Jonathan break away, only to both immediately turn and locate Steve. That does something weird to Steve’s insides, the way they both don’t bother to linger on the other before they were looking for Steve like they weren’t whole without him there. “I think I have plans, though.”

“All weekend?” Robin pushes, but she’s grinning wide. Jonathan and Nancy share a look, and then they grin back, and Steve knows they’re all in on that joke.

“Oh, yeah. I think I’ll be _real_ busy, all damn weekend.”

Nancy and Jonathan give him matching grins, a spark of knowing glinting in their eyes, and Steve thinks, _They’re going to ruin me, and I’ll love every minute of it._

And that becomes Steve’s life. Between working at the video store, hanging out with Nancy, Jonathan, and Robin when Jonathan came home on the weekends and Nancy and Robin during the week, and the occasional slip back into the Upside Down when Billy wanted an update on things but didn’t want to scare the kids, Steve’s life moves on. The kids act like the teenagers they are, Joyce tries her best to keep Hopper and Alexei and El from turning into a mess of a household on the days she’s gone and Hopper’s away trying to get his job back, leaving Alexei to El’s devices, and Robin picks up a pen pal in the form of a girl Jonathan knows from his new school, and things move on.

And, once again, everything settles into a safe calm.

At least—for now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaand we're done! Holy hell, that was a ride.
> 
> Thank you all for making it to the end! I had no idea what I was doing when I started this, and, frankly, I still don't know what I was doing by the end of it, but we're here! And, well, I'm not mad with how it came out!
> 
> Special thanks to BrainBroth and MetalMomma89, because you two kept me company the whole way, and I seriously appreciate that! ♡♡♡
> 
> … and now I’m going to do NaNoWriMo, because thinking ahead of the game is not in my repertoire.


End file.
